Related to this - I feel like the prevailing collective wisdom on SoSH is (or was, until today) that Bloom was basically brought in to rebuild the farm and/or slash payroll with a several-year grace period on the MLB club. And I'm a bit skeptical of the whole premise.
Certainly in 2019, many both on this board and in the baseball intelligentsia thought that Bloom was inheriting a talented but flawed team, and his job was to figure out how to navigate the Sox through the impending payroll crunch through 2022 - including, of course, jettisoning Mookie - before he could finally open up the wallet after 2022 as people like JD and Eo came off the books. In fact, as recently as the beginning of this past offseason, we heard comments like
View: https://twitter.com/ChrisCotillo/status/1599914736313073664?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1599914736313073664%7Ctwgr%5E003c89af3144229eb88215c5ca7322c7b5b49349%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcsportsboston.com%2Fmlb%2Fboston-red-sox%2Fchaim-bloom-lays-out-his-plan-for-red-sox-offseason%2F277375%2F
"Chaim Bloom just got into specifics about Boston’s off-season plan. He repeatedly said Red Sox want to add 7, 8 or 9 players to build a contender in 2023. That includes another reliever, another starter and position players."
Then, after almost none of those things happened, we as a board collectively decided that Henry had obviously brought Bloom on to rebuild the farm and/or cut payroll and was totally okay with mediocre seasons in the meantime. And I think it's fair to ask whether that collective wisdom was actually grounded in tangible, real-world evidence or if it's just a bit of Stockholm Syndrome on our part.
Now, I think it's obviously correct to say that Henry wanted Bloom to rebuild the farm system. But Henry also wanted Theo Epstein to rebuild the farm when he was hired, and Theo's major league teams certainly did okay while the farm was being rebuilt. So it's not clear that one can jump from "Henry wanted a farm system rebuild" to "Henry was fine with the MLB team missing the playoffs more often than not during that rebuild." Building a farm and fielding a competitive MLB team aren't mutually exclusive. What's that line - "poor teams rebuild, rich teams reload"? Something like that.