McAdam: “Full Throttle” may mean business as usual

BringBackMo said:

OK, that was a really long article and hard to follow. My understanding is that the Yankees were not in on Manny, so the Sox weren't competing with them for him. If this article says otherwise then I stand corrected.

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The article is a transcript from an ESPN documentary following the pursuit of Manny as a free agent.

The Yankees wanted and got Mussina that winter. Once they had him they backed out of any Manny pursuit. Manny was basically the consolation prize that Duquette pivoted to after he lost out on Mussina. IIRC, the Sox were bidding with the Cleveland team. They won the prize by not only crushing Cleveland's best offer but being willing to hire Manny's favorite Cleveland clubhouse attendant (who didn't want to leave).

BeantownIdaho said:

“According to a baseball source, the Red Sox have told at least one free agent target that they need to shed more payroll before pursuing him as aggressively as they want to,” Cotillo wrote. seems like a report to me. What is your definition of a report?

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You are correct, that’s a report - my bad.

A better way to characterize my reaction to Cotillos report would have been I remain skeptical of agent breadcrumbs though do believe one baseball source told him about at least one FA situation.

YTF said:

You don't know the source or context of those "reports", nor do I. So let me ask you this, if the Sox are indeed looking to "shed salary" could it be possible that is with the eye toward making multiple moves rather than just one? Might that $10M in savings after the Sale trade have been enough to get them at the level that they can bring in the player(s) that they are now targeting and still stay under the threshold? Do they need to move another player to get to where they want to be? My answer is that we don't know, which is kind of my point.

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Of course that's possible and I would say exactly what they are trying to do... even a step further, I think its a wise plan to get more for the same money. . But in the context of the Yam, bidding timeline, they had not traded Sale to free up that money and were working with even less to sign him if they were looking to stay under the threshold. To me, that points toward trying to get a team friendly deal, which was never going to work. I will concede, that it could be that they were willing to go over for a player like Yam, but not what would be left over to choose from.

sezwho said:

You are correct, that’s a report - my bad.

A better way to characterize my reaction to Cotillos report would have been I remain skeptical of agent breadcrumbs though do believe one baseball source told him about at least one FA situation.

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Skeptical is a good word for the entire media off-season.

Red(s)HawksFan said:

The article is a transcript from an ESPN documentary following the pursuit of Manny as a free agent.

The Yankees wanted and got Mussina that winter. Once they had him they backed out of any Manny pursuit. Manny was basically the consolation prize that Duquette pivoted to after he lost out on Mussina. IIRC, the Sox were bidding with the Cleveland team. They won the prize by not only crushing Cleveland's best offer but being willing to hire Manny's favorite Cleveland clubhouse attendant (who didn't want to leave).

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Ahhhh. Thank you for jogging my memory. I recall that now. So, if anything, the Manny saga only supports the notion that the Yankees get the free agents they want, and the rest of the baseball world has to make plans based upon that.

BringBackMo said:

Ahhhh. Thank you for jogging my memory. I recall that now. So, if anything, the Manny saga only supports the notion that the Yankees get the free agents they want, and the rest of the baseball world has to make plans based upon that.

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If memory serves, google servers didn’t immediately serve it up, there is a picture supposedly taken the night of the contract signing where Duquette looks like a homeless serial killer and Boras looks like the cat that ate the canary.

chawson said:

You being unable to understand something doesn't mean I'm being condescending.



Happy new year. I meant your post here (in the salary cap thread) though you’re right someone else linked the research on declining labor share of revenues.

I don’t think it’s always possible to bridge the gap with money. There’s a divide on this and it comes up time to time — some believe that money’s the deciding factor no matter what. I don’t.

And I think it's a factor in attracting free agents that the media and fans have turned on, varyingly, virtually all players who have signed long-term deals here. Nomar, Price, Sale, Manny, Beckett, Eovaldi, Daisuke, Hanley, Sandoval, Lackey, Castillo, Foulke, Drew. Some of those guys surely were guilty of poor play, but not all of them.

David Price's 118 ERA- over the four years he was here (his age 30-33 seasons) was better than Jordan Montgomery's 117 ERA+ over his last four (his age 27-30 seasons, more in his prime). Yet the majority of the fan base wanted Price gone, and are going to howl once Montgomery signs elsewhere.

We're seeing it with the frustration with Yamamoto. A lot of posters want to believe that Henry's cheap because Yamamoto signed elsewhere. As if it's not totally reasonable for a Japanese star to prefer the West Coast! By all indications, the Sox genuinely were in on him and assured him the money would be there if he made his decision. They didn't lead with an offer (so as to give other teams a chance to match it). There were reports that he was going to decide the fit, and "the money would follow," which I took to mean contract terms and formal offer.

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I think for folks who are worried about the team dropping into the middle of the pack with payroll, it's more complicated than no Yamamoto = cheap owners. The drop in payroll has more or less coincided with the team not landing elite talent from outside the organization in a long while (Sale? Price? - that's a lotta years); and doing that WAS a key part of the pie for the the 4 WS teams. It's not a matter of irrational cry babies wanting everything now, or wanting a team totally built with FA, but a response to the fact that organizational philosophy seems less aggressive than when Henry et al took over; that they are not flexing their financial muscle to full advantage.

So, yeah, as a fan, you want ownership that's gonna use every quill available. This ownership used to do that, now it seems they kinda don't. Or are we in an interstitial period, and payroll will go back up into the top 5? I can't say for sure, but I suppose in the next 1 to 13 months we should find out! If sitting at 12th is the new normal then, yeah, that pisses me off. I love baseball. I love the Red Sox. I love when they are competing for championships, and I want ownership to work with the same kind of urgency as they did 20 years ago. Breslow has already made some crafty moves, that seem to be pulling the coil back to potentially spring forward - that's intriguing. So, again, I don't really know what ownership's grand plan is and hope for the best. But their actions the last few years have been disappointing.

Preemptive counter to the counter: Some their bigger ticket items recently feel reactive or kinda "no choice" - Story was the last MI on the market of stars, coming off injury and a down year, and so was chepaer. Devers was the last of the beloved homegrown stars (though probably least valuable among them), and what else ya gonna do?

As for Montgomery ...good point you make, he likely will be overpaid. But Price was actually better than advertised with the Sox when healthy, AND, it's all relative - the 2023 Red Sox really really really really need starting pitching in a bad way.

BringBackMo said:

That was NOT an auction. Back then, everyone submitted one bid and the team with the highest bid won, and then had rights to negotiate a contract with the player. That is not a free agent. Can you provide an example of an actual free agent?

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I wasn't really disagreeing with you. It takes extreme measures (Matsuzaka, Cano) to nudge out the Yanks on a player they want, though Duquette may have gotten some value out of driving up the price the Yanks paid for Bernie Williams. Different process in 2006, but certainly a data point about the {still current} Sox ownership's mindset then vs. recent seasons.

Cano is a rare example of the Yankees losing a player they wanted to retain. Experience shows the Sox should be wary of guys the Yanks are not very eager to keep {see Torres, Mendoza}.

sezwho said:

here is a picture supposedly taken the night of the contract signing where Duquette looks like a homeless serial killer

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Dan Duquette has always owned a home.

cantor44 said:

Preemptive counter to the counter: Some their bigger ticket items recently feel reactive or kinda "no choice" - Story was the last MI on the market of stars, coming off injury and a down year, and so was chepaer. Devers was the last of the beloved homegrown stars (though probably least valuable among them), and what else ya gonna do?

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Devers is also the only one of those stars that will still be in his 20s when the kids come up from Worcester, and I don't think that's a coincidence.

Harry Hooper said:

I wasn't really disagreeing with you. It takes extreme measures (Matsuzaka, Cano) to nudge out the Yanks on a player they want, though Duquette may have gotten some value out of driving up the price the Yanks paid for Bernie Williams. Different process in 2006, but certainly a data point about the {still current} Sox ownership's mindset then vs. recent seasons.

Cano is a rare example of the Yankees losing a player they wanted to retain. Experience shows the Sox should be wary of guys the Yanks are not very eager to keep {see Torres, Mendoza}.

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The Bernie Williams pursuit was such a sad moment in Sox history. It really felt like we were going to get him. Then Lucy pulled the football away again.

cantor44 said:

The drop in payroll has more or less coincided with the team not landing elite talent from outside the organization in a long while (Sale? Price? - that's a lotta years)

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This keeps being said. I'll just quote my response from the last time it was brought up:
"The Red Sox spent the last four seasons intentionally not signing elite free agents as part of a rebuild that everyone on this board is familiar with. The lone exception was Story, who they were able to get on a good deal. When you’re intentionally not signing top free agents, the interesting side effect is that you wind up not signing top free agents."
So, really, the drop in payroll has more or less coincided with the team going through a rebuild. The Sox have announced that they are going to compete this year. They have made a series of smaller moves that may have already made the team better than it was last year. Many different posters, from all sides of the Great Ownership Debate, have suggested that these moves all appear to indicate that one or two big additional moves are coming. If we get to opening day and that hasn't happened, if the Sox have not brought in the kind of top talent that will allow them to compete for the playoffs, then I think it will be fair to criticize the team in this way.

cantor44 said:

Preemptive counter to the counter: Some their bigger ticket items recently feel reactive or kinda "no choice" - Story was the last MI on the market of stars, coming off injury and a down year, and so was chepaer. Devers was the last of the beloved homegrown stars (though probably least valuable among them), and what else ya gonna do?

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OK, so other than the times that they HAVE locked up top talent they haven't locked up top talent. Got it.

Rovin Romine said:

1) That's not what "team friendly" means.

2) Occam's Razor says they made a serious bid. Not that this was some kind of elaborate deception to troll "fans" who already hate the club. Fans who are so clever to have seen through such.

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1) Another definition of team friendly is using club options for incentives to add onto a base contract. It would not shock me if they used any of those to add onto their lower guaranteed offer. That shouldn’t be the way to go when going up against the Yankees, Mets, or Dodgers in competing for a player.

2) Their definition of serious and what was serious to YY is obviously different considering YY came to the East Coast after meeting with every team in LA and didn’t come to Boston. No one thinks it was a deception to troll fans or anything stupid like that.

Who hates the club?? Certainly not me. I, like the majority of Sox fans, are frustrated with the direction the franchise is going. The dumpster diving for reclamation projects and having to hope that everything breaks right to have a chance to be a playoff team(in the era that is the easiest to do so) is both frustrating as a fan and also not the way a team with resources as deep as FSG should be acting. If they’re pinning all their hopes on waiting for the prospects in their system to hit in order to contend then open up the wallet fully, that’s a dangerous game to play. The most successful teams in this Sox era have blended homegrown guys, acquiring star talent, and hitting on diamonds in the rough together.

Let’s see how this offseason shakes out because Breslow has shown a lot of good things including the willingness to make a tough decision to make the team better with the Sale trade. I hope he now goes out and gets a top of the rotation guy.

BringBackMo said:

Why didn’t Yamamoto go to the Yankees or the Mets? Is it because they weren’t serious bidders? Is it possible to be a serious bidder and still not win the bidding?

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They both had top of the market offers: the Yankees by AAV and the Mets by total value. They warranted a visit to NYC (and a dinner with Cohen), but the the Sox bid wasn't enough to entice him to visit Fenway, even if their bid was going to be shopped back to the Dodgers (and there is precedent (Teixeira) for the team to bow out of bidding if they don't think they can win, rather than just running up the price for the winner - JWH doesn't look to be interested in driving up the total cost of players by just bidding on on free agents).

Rovin Romine said:

There were multiple reports they made a second offer and were in the final mix of interested teams. Would they have bothered to keep going if they were not serious after the initial LA meeting? Or would they have pivoted as other teams did and singed a mid-tier starter prior to the YY signing as insurance?

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I didn't see any other reports, only the initial tweet of $300M offer that wasn't corroborated by anyone else. As noted, I think Merloni's idea is telling, namely that an offer that they were proud of would've come out.

I think the Sox did pivot - they signed Giolito fairly quickly. OTOH the pitchers to pivot to are represented by Boras, and there was no way any team was suddenly going to get them to sign quickly.

Rovin Romine said:

I don't think it benefits the club at all to "be seen" by the fans as being wiling to spend money, and I don't think the average fan will recall whether they were in or out on Ohtani and YY. Even here, we're seeing fact-free posting on the subject. However, I think it benefits them re: free agents and their agent-representatives. But that's something of a closed circle.

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You don't think it benefits the club to get people excited about the team when they're also looking to sell ticket packages? The average fan may not remember if the were in or out on YY, but they will see who the team has actually signed, and we have a history of this ownership group scaling back spending and treating CBT thresholds as hard caps.

Ownership is in a tough spot. They are perceived as cheap and disinterested by an awful lot of the fan base. The truth is the current situation is purely based on a lot of bad decisions and just some really bad luck. The old saying "time heals all wounds" comes to mind. Breslow needs time to fix this mess. And luckily, help is likely to arrive over the next few years.

sezwho said:

I’m still not sure this has risen to the level of ‘report’ yet.




Merloni had an interesting observation on the latest Carrabis podcast, which was essentially if they had an offer to be proud of we would have heard it a la recent Yankees, Toronto, Mets offer leaks.

I don’t think the big money days will be here again any time soon, but I do trust Breslow to lean into pitching development and acquisition in a way that will produce winners even at a ~ 225 level if necessary.

Don’t like to dwell on it too much, but the combo of out of towners, lyrical band box looky-loos, random dropins, and the eternally grateful may mean a return to the top of market is never necessary again. Have to sell a lot of extra tickets to pay 40million of YY plus the tax.

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Based on the lack of info on the Red Sox offer since YY was signed, I have to believe whatever they offered would not look good to the fan base and reinforce the cheap and disinterested claims. As a result, we may never know the true offer. Even if it was 300 on the nose, I think we could all respect that and move on. So, I have to believe it may have been embarrassingly lower. Even so, what's done is done.

RedOctober3829 said:

The dumpster diving for reclamation projects and having to hope that everything breaks right to have a chance to be a playoff team(in the era that is the easiest to do so) is both frustr

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It may be numerically simpler to qualify for the playoffs, but is NOT the easiest era to win. If anything it's the hardest. How many teams are legitimately competing now versus 2004? The financial landscape is completely different, and the Sox probably aren't the biggest beneficiaries of the new financial normal, though they are hardly the big losers either. But right now the only noncompetitive teams are Chicago, Oakland, Washington, Colorado and LAA. I was reading an article about the Cease market and teams like the DBacks, Reds, Cubs and others are mentioned. KC has been signing guys. Lots of the younger, talented medium-market teams (e.g. Seattle) aren't selling. The entire AL East is stacked, and two of those are among the teams willing to spend, while the other two don't have to. If you're going to peg the organization for their approach, you can't just think in a vacuum or compare it to eras which, however fresh in our memories they may be, are completely irrelevant to roster-building strategies back here in the now.

BringBackMo said:

The Bernie Williams pursuit was such a sad moment in Sox history. It really felt like we were going to get him. Then Lucy pulled the football away again.

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But as you also point out, it is not unique to the Red Sox. The Giants had the football pulled away last offseason in the Judge sweepstakes.

OCD SS said:

I didn't see any other reports, only the initial tweet of $300M offer that wasn't corroborated by anyone else. As noted, I think Merloni's idea is telling, namely that an offer that they were proud of would've come out.

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I don't buy much of what Merloni has to say. He hasn't predicted much of anything, he doesn't appear to have any great contacts on the baseball side, and he went on a bizarre rant on Carrabis' podcast about how Cora is going to leave after this season. Maybe he will end up being right, but the idea that management is taking him for granted -- right after Cora supposedly had a power struggle with the GM over supportive moves and ownership fired the GM -- seems ridiculous. He left out that entire part of it, not to mention the fact that maybe the reason he doesn't have an extension is because the new GM had like five minutes to get ready for free agency and can do a manager extension later. Maybe Cora leaves but I am very skeptical of Lou's hunches after the last month of him being weird or wrong.

jon abbey said:

NY definitely didn’t really want to retain Cano, I remember thinking they bid enough to make it look like they did but they knew it almost certainly wouldn’t be enough to keep him. I’m sure there’s a thread from then documenting the whole thing as it happened.

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Ok, so zero examples. That was a weird period with Jay-Z's involvement.

OCD SS said:

They both had top of the market offers: the Yankees by AAV and the Mets by total value. They warranted a visit to NYC (and a dinner with Cohen), but the the Sox bid wasn't enough to entice him to visit Fenway, even if their bid was going to be shopped back to the Dodgers (and there is precedent (Teixeira) for the team to bow out of bidding if they don't think they can win, rather than just running up the price for the winner - JWH doesn't look to be interested in driving up the total cost of players by just bidding on on free agents).

I didn't see any other reports, only the initial tweet of $300M offer that wasn't corroborated by anyone else. As noted, I think Merloni's idea is telling, namely that an offer that they were proud of would've come out.

I think the Sox did pivot - they signed Giolito fairly quickly. OTOH the pitchers to pivot to are represented by Boras, and there was no way any team was suddenly going to get them to sign quickly.


You don't think it benefits the club to get people excited about the team when they're also looking to sell ticket packages? The average fan may not remember if the were in or out on YY, but they will see who the team has actually signed, and we have a history of this ownership group scaling back spending and treating CBT thresholds as hard caps.

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So let's tie your arguments together.

Postion 1


OR

Position 2


Some guy pointed this out earlier:

Rovin Romine said:

Occam's Razor says they made a serious bid. Not that this was some kind of elaborate deception to troll "fans" who already hate the club. Fans who are so clever to have seen through such.

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chrisfont9 said:

It may be numerically simpler to qualify for the playoffs, but is NOT the easiest era to win. If anything it's the hardest. How many teams are legitimately competing now versus 2004? The financial landscape is completely different, and the Sox probably aren't the biggest beneficiaries of the new financial normal, though they are hardly the big losers either. But right now the only noncompetitive teams are Chicago, Oakland, Washington, Colorado and LAA. I was reading an article about the Cease market and teams like the DBacks, Reds, Cubs and others are mentioned. KC has been signing guys. Lots of the younger, talented medium-market teams (e.g. Seattle) aren't selling. The entire AL East is stacked, and two of those are among the teams willing to spend, while the other two don't have to. If you're going to peg the organization for their approach, you can't just think in a vacuum or compare it to eras which, however fresh in our memories they may be, are completely irrelevant to roster-building strategies back here in the now.

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I think it was harder to win in the 90s and 00s than it is now. Fewer playoff spots meant more teams waived the white flag earlier or didn’t try as hard. There were only so many teams who had realistic chances at the playoffs. Now with 6 teams making it, most years if you can get to 85-88 wins you have a good chance of being in it right to the end. This year’s AL WC race is likely an outlier in terms of all 3 teams in over 88 wins.

Roster building is roster building no matter what era. Draft, develop, and build a homegrown core while spending either FA dollars or prospect capital in a trade to get really good players to supplement that core. If they don’t want to do either of the 2, it’s going to be really hard to get back to where they want to be especially as you say more teams are trying to win.

To me, with the division more competitive now it should give ownership more reason to want to get better.

BringBackMo said:

This keeps being said. I'll just quote my response from the last time it was brought up:
"The Red Sox spent the last four seasons intentionally not signing elite free agents as part of a rebuild that everyone on this board is familiar with. The lone exception was Story, who they were able to get on a good deal. When you’re intentionally not signing top free agents, the interesting side effect is that you wind up not signing top free agents."
So, really, the drop in payroll has more or less coincided with the team going through a rebuild. The Sox have announced that they are going to compete this year. They have made a series of smaller moves that may have already made the team better than it was last year. Many different posters, from all sides of the Great Ownership Debate, have suggested that these moves all appear to indicate that one or two big additional moves are coming. If we get to opening day and that hasn't happened, if the Sox have not brought in the kind of top talent that will allow them to compete for the playoffs, then I think it will be fair to criticize the team in this way.

OK, so other than the times that they HAVE locked up top talent they haven't locked up top talent. Got it.

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I'm not sure Story is top talent, are you? Do appreciate his glove and glad he's on the team, but he's no longer an all-star talent. Hope he bounces back to form from a few years ago. I mean - for someone who insists on a nuanced understanding of the game and FO strategy, you sure can mow down someone who disagrees with you in the most reductive ways. Story is not the kind of acquisition the team made in its hey day: Pedro, Manny, Schilling, Becket, (even Damon at the time), Sale (though not the extension).

Meanwhile, I have posted myself that I think additional moves might be coming this year - explicitly (even in the post you responded to!!). That I came around to Giolito signing and like the Sale trade for exactly that reason. I said I don't know if the organization was in an interstitial period the last few years or the first few into a new paradigm. I said it could go either way, but if the latter (which is possible - we will see) - it sure would be f-ing frustrating. So, I wasn't definitely criticizing, just noting what the trend has been, and hoping it changes ...I guess my position is exactly yours except I'm not convinced one way or the other how things will go - I could see both happening.

EDIT: I will add, too, BBM, since you're engaging with me again, in days past you were very hostile to my sense that Bloom seemed trigger shy during his tenure - cautious, hedging - and intel suggest that that was indeed the case. His inability to make some bold deals may have lost him his job. So, I was kinda right on that one (though always recognized that he helped restock the farm) ... in this case, I'm saying there is suggestive evidence both ways: that the team will never spend like it once did, or that it's waiting for the right moment to do so.

cantor44 said:

I'm not sure Story is top talent, are you? Do appreciate his glove and glad he's on the team, but he's no longer an all-star talent. Hope he bounces back to form from a few years ago. I mean - for someone who insists on a nuanced understanding of the game and FO strategy, you sure can mow down someone who disagrees with you in the most reductive ways. Story is not the kind of acquisition the team made in its hey day: Pedro, Manny, Schilling, Becket, (even Damon at the time), Sale (though not the extension).

Meanwhile, I have posted myself that I think additional moves might be coming this year - explicitly (even in the post you responded to!!). That I came around to Giolito signing and like the Sale trade for exactly that reason. I said I don't know if the organization was in an interstitial period the last few years or the first few into a new paradigm. I said it could go either way, but if the latter (which is possible - we will see) - it sure would be f-ing frustrating. So, I wasn't definitely criticizing, just noting what the trend has been, and hoping it changes ...I guess my position is exactly yours except I'm not convinced one way or the other how things will go - I could see both happening.

EDIT: I will add, too, BBM, since you're engaging with me again, in days past you were very hostile to my sense that Bloom seemed trigger shy during his tenure - cautious, hedging - and intel suggest that that was indeed the case. His inability to make some bold deals may have lost him his job. So, I was kinda right on that one (though always recognized that he helped restock the farm) ... in this case, I'm saying there is suggestive evidence both ways: that the team will never spend like it once did, or that it's waiting for the right moment to do so.

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I don’t know, this seems a little bit too colored by Story’s hurt/tough time in Boston.

Story put up a 15.8 fWAR in the four seasons before hitting free agency. That ranks 65th of all MLB players this century, above Bryce Harper, Corey Seager, Dansby Swanson, Derek Jeter, and Carlos Correa in their age-corresponding seasons (25-28). Story even lost three-fifths of a season in 2020, and he’d be roughly 50th on that list if he hadn’t.

Damon had a bad season the year we signed him, hitting .256/.324/.363. His Sox days were heroic, but he was much worse than Story by fWAR over their preceding seasons.

Anyway, not to digress too much, but Story was absolutely a star-caliber player — to the degree that that can be objectively measured — when we signed him.

RedOctober3829 said:

I think it was harder to win in the 90s and 00s than it is now. Fewer playoff spots meant more teams waived the white flag earlier or didn’t try as hard. There were only so many teams who had realistic chances at the playoffs. Now with 6 teams making it, most years if you can get to 85-88 wins you have a good chance of being in it right to the end. This year’s AL WC race is likely an outlier in terms of all 3 teams in over 88 wins.

Roster building is roster building no matter what era. Draft, develop, and build a homegrown core while spending either FA dollars or prospect capital in a trade to get really good players to supplement that core. If they don’t want to do either of the 2, it’s going to be really hard to get back to where they want to be especially as you say more teams are trying to win.

To me, with the division more competitive now it should give ownership more reason to want to get better.

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Maybe the Sox should take the Orioles route and be terrible for years. Draft well by being in the single digits, stockpile some crazy talent and spend in five years?

sezwho said:

I’m still not sure this has risen to the level of ‘report’ yet.




Merloni had an interesting observation on the latest Carrabis podcast, which was essentially if they had an offer to be proud of we would have heard it a la recent Yankees, Toronto, Mets offer leaks.

I don’t think the big money days will be here again any time soon, but I do trust Breslow to lean into pitching development and acquisition in a way that will produce winners even at a ~ 225 level if necessary.

Don’t like to dwell on it too much, but the combo of out of towners, lyrical band box looky-loos, random dropins, and the eternally grateful may mean a return to the top of market is never necessary again. Have to sell a lot of extra tickets to pay 40million of YY plus the tax.

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Devil's advocate...Why would you advertise to Boras and other agents representing the remaining free agent pitchers how much you offered Yamamoto?

Info on offers is sketchy at best, so is it possible the Sox were very active in the opening rounds of the YY sweepstakes but bowed out without making an offer at all once the cost of staying in the game rose above a certain point?

YTF said:

Devil's advocate...Why would you advertise to Boras and other agents representing the remaining free agent pitchers how much you offered Yamamoto?

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would it matter? I mean, they know what some of his offers are, they got leaked. Do we think agents are changing their asks based on what the Red Sox offerred Yamamoto, versus what the 4-5 teams they know about did? Yamamoto's valuation to the Red Sox doesn't impact anyone else, because everyone knows:
1. What Yamamoto got
2. That it wasn't an outlier bid.

There isn't any real reason to leak your bid other than to pacify your fanbase if the bid was competitive, on the other hand you gain nothing from keeping it a secret either (unless it was non-competitive I guess). I wouldn't read much into it, in a vaccuum. I guess you could add it to a bunch of other rumors as a potential indicator that they aren't willing to really compete with the top teams financially, but that's still guesswork.

As to YY, whether it was money, city, competitive reasons, it seems clear the Red Sox never made the shortlist.

Mike473 said:

Ownership is in a tough spot. They are perceived as cheap and disinterested by an awful lot of the fan base. The truth is the current situation is purely based on a lot of bad decisions and just some really bad luck. The old saying "time heals all wounds" comes to mind. Breslow needs time to fix this mess. And luckily, help is likely to arrive over the next few years.


Based on the lack of info on the Red Sox offer since YY was signed, I have to believe whatever they offered would not look good to the fan base and reinforce the cheap and disinterested claims. As a result, we may never know the true offer. Even if it was 300 on the nose, I think we could all respect that and move on. So, I have to believe it may have been embarrassingly lower. Even so, what's done is done.

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Which is it?

The thing with Yamamoto was that he was the perfect fit to immediately improve the team and make them look competitive and relevant (and interesting), and you could get him without giving up any prospects. The thought was that all you had to do was blow him away with money and they looked set up to do that.

There may be reasons that they were actually never going to do that or that he was never going to sign here, but damn, I really thought they were going to take that big swing.

Cellar-Door said:

would it matter? I mean, they know what some of his offers are, they got leaked. Do we think agents are changing their asks based on what the Red Sox offerred Yamamoto, versus what the 4-5 teams they know about did? Yamamoto's valuation to the Red Sox doesn't impact anyone else, because everyone knows:
1. What Yamamoto got
2. That it wasn't an outlier bid.

There isn't any real reason to leak your bid other than to pacify your fanbase if the bid was competitive, on the other hand you gain nothing from keeping it a secret either (unless it was non-competitive I guess). I wouldn't read much into it, in a vaccuum. I guess you could add it to a bunch of other rumors as a potential indicator that they aren't willing to really compete with the top teams financially, but that's still guesswork.

As to YY, whether it was money, city, competitive reasons, it seems clear the Red Sox never made the shortlist.

Click to expand...

Would it matter? I've no idea, but I see no advantage to doing so.

Rovin Romine said:

So let's tie your arguments together....

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I think you're mischaracterizing my reading and that's fine, I'll itemize them myself for anyone who's interested.

However my point is that the Sox's pursuit of YY is similar to other top-tier FAs they've gone after and falls into a pattern of this ownership group keeping a stricter budget than we've generally been assuming. Saving money on payroll below the CBT is not being saved to make a giant splash on someone else. It's another data point towards a different idea of how they look to construct the team.

Rovin Romine said:

Postion 1... see below
Position 2: They tried to sign YY, who proved to be only seriously interested in LA. Then they pivoted to Giolito.

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Except I don't think you're right here. YY wanted to play for the Dodgers if he could, but he also wanted the highest contract he could. So he visited the teams offering the top contracts, and took those back to the Dodgers. This doesn't change that the Sox were probably not in the final mix. I think people here may be inclined to lean a bit too much on the "he was always going to LA" as a way to excuse the lack of a competitive offers from the Sox, when IMO if there is a "Keep your powder dry" FA target for a team in need of pitching, it was YY. We need to recalibrate how they're approaching FA spending.

To further clarify:

We can rely on rando reporting for other clubs' offers to YY, but not the Sox.

• AFAICT there was exactly one report of the Sox making an offer (the supposed $300M tweet), and after it came there was another tweet by someone else that no one had made offers yet, he was looking to do that in a second round. I haven't seen any substantiation of the Sox's offer (and here Merloni's point is telling), but it seems that the other teams with bids have had other reporting done around their offers. If I'm wrong, by all means point out where...

Even though YY went to NYC, he didn't go to either baseball facility, nor did he go to Philly. However, it's the non-visit to Fenway that's the most significant here.

• No, as I said, he went to the city with the biggest offers on the table (AAV & total); he met with the people who were going to give him money. Boston/ Fenway/ JWH's yacht anchored in international waters makes no difference: the Sox didn't have an offer that was better than either of these.

But this does not matter because the Sox never made a serious bid, and certainly not a second one.
The Sox bid was low and kept secret because they wanted people to know about the bid. . .but not that it was a small bid.

• I never really said this. I would phrase it that they had their valuation of YY and went into the meeting with LA to see if they could get him to sign for that. They couldn't, and so they didn't get a visit. It's not unreasonable to think that several teams might look at his frame and lack of MLB experience and come in with lower offers (remember MLBTR had him at 9 years/ $225M), but everyone else came in with the same idea (or more).
• I believe we've both written about the benefits the team may see from being in the mix for FA (with free agents, their agents, other teams, and the fans), but I've never said that this was some sort of hoax or sham; they simply weren't prepared to go as far as it would take so that the Dodgers walked away, and they never came out and said they were pivoting to other players. I'm sure a large part of this was the Boston sports media getting a good bit of content out of all the reporting, especially with nothing else really going on.

Even though the Sox were always entirely out of the bidding for YY and not serious about signing him anyway, they waited until he was signed and then pivoted to Giolitio. Or faux-pivoted, we should say.

• We have no way of knowing how this happened; certainly Breslow and his team are smart enough to hold parallel negotiations. The Sox always needed at least 2 SP, so adding in Giolito can be seen as separate from YY unless signing YY would have limited the rest of their budget.

The intial faux-bid was made so that the fan-polli would get excited because the Sox were looking to sell ticket packages. Even though the fan-polli will not remember if the team was pursuing YY and will only see who the team signed.
Guess they just got lucky nobody signed Giolito in the meantime!!! But that's the risk you run when you're just faux-bidding for PR purposes.

• Again, I never really said any of this; it seems like you're adding quite a bit about this being theater put on somehow justify that the Sox mad a good offer to YY.
• That they signed Giolito is a solid step, but given his most recent performance, let's not pretend he's on the same level as YY. He's a short term reclimation project and has some upside.
• Boras is hoping that teams will "pivot" from YY to Snell or Montgomery, but it doesn't look like the Sox are going to make an offer in that ballpark (and I certainly wouldn't want them to).

But keen-minded posters have cleverly sussed out their elaborate plan.

• From a snark perspective, this is pretty weak, and honestly, beneath you.

OCD SS said:

This doesn't change that the Sox were probably not in the final mix. I think people here may be inclined to lean a bit too much on the "he was always going to LA" as a way to excuse the lack of a competitive offers from the Sox, when IMO if there is a "Keep your powder dry" FA target for a team in need of pitching, it was YY. We need to recalibrate how they're approaching FA spending.

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You have said variations of this a number of times. Whether you intend it that way or not, it is coming across to other posters as a criticism, essentially that the Red Sox are not spending on free agents the way that they should be and the way that they have done in the past.

To put the question to you again:
How does the pursuit of Yamamoto tell us anything, one way or the other, about how the Red Sox will spend now that they have come out of the rebuild and have announced they are competing? Can you point to other times in Red Sox history when the team has competed for a free agent with the Yankees and come away the winner? If not, then how does failing to sign Yamamoto when both the Yankees and the New Yankees wanted him give us any indication at all of how the Sox will spend on free agents those teams are not pursuing? If you agree that the Sox have many times lost free agent chases to the Yankees, but have spent lots of money on other free agents nonetheless, then what is different about this instance of losing a free agent to the Dodgers?

Another question:
Do you think the Yankees and Dodgers also saw Yamamoto as a “Keep your powder dry” free agent target? If so, what would you have liked for the Red Sox to do differently in this process? Can you sketch out an approach that would have resulted in Yamamoto signing here instead of with those two teams that also viewed him as a cornerstone of the future who cost nothing but money?

Two final questions:
Why didn’t the Yankees land Yamamoto, given that they appear to have viewed him as a keep your powder dry free agent target?

Do you think the Mets saw Yamamoto as a keep your powder dry free agent? What should they have done differently in order to land him?

cantor44 said:

I'm not sure Story is top talent, are you? Do appreciate his glove and glad he's on the team, but he's no longer an all-star talent. Hope he bounces back to form from a few years ago. I mean - for someone who insists on a nuanced understanding of the game and FO strategy, you sure can mow down someone who disagrees with you in the most reductive ways. Story is not the kind of acquisition the team made in its hey day: Pedro, Manny, Schilling, Becket, (even Damon at the time), Sale (though not the extension).

Meanwhile, I have posted myself that I think additional moves might be coming this year - explicitly (even in the post you responded to!!). That I came around to Giolito signing and like the Sale trade for exactly that reason. I said I don't know if the organization was in an interstitial period the last few years or the first few into a new paradigm. I said it could go either way, but if the latter (which is possible - we will see) - it sure would be f-ing frustrating. So, I wasn't definitely criticizing, just noting what the trend has been, and hoping it changes ...I guess my position is exactly yours except I'm not convinced one way or the other how things will go - I could see both happening.

EDIT: I will add, too, BBM, since you're engaging with me again, in days past you were very hostile to my sense that Bloom seemed trigger shy during his tenure - cautious, hedging - and intel suggest that that was indeed the case. His inability to make some bold deals may have lost him his job. So, I was kinda right on that one (though always recognized that he helped restock the farm) ... in this case, I'm saying there is suggestive evidence both ways: that the team will never spend like it once did, or that it's waiting for the right moment to do so.

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I honestly don’t follow what you’re saying in this post. But if you want to argue that Story wasn’t a top player when he signed with the Sox then fine, throughout the rebuild the Red Sox signed zero top players because, well, they were rebuilding.

BringBackMo said:

I honestly don’t follow what you’re saying in this post. But if you want to argue that Story wasn’t a top player when he signed with the Sox then fine, throughout the rebuild the Red Sox signed zero top players because, well, they were rebuilding.

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So, since you've stated this as accepted fact several times, it might be a good time to point out that it's highly possible that you invented this rebuild in your head. At no point have the Sox said they are rebuilding. And, moreover, throughout the last four years, they have made innumerable moves that would indicate they are not trying to rebuild (signing Story, Jansen, and Yoshida,, going over the luxury tax, not selling Xander at any point, not selling anyone at any of the trade deadlines. etc.) And, given the amount of talent on the 2019 team, anyone who would've suggested that it was time to initiate a rebuild at that point would have been considered insane.

In fact, if you were to list the actions you would expect a rebuilding team to take, the Sox have only taken one of them: they've refused to spend big for free agents. If you want to insist that thee only logical explanation for that is they were rebuilding, I guess you can do that. But it's just as sensible for other people to deduce that the reason they aren't spending big on free agents is because they've decided they don't want to spend big on free agents. In fact, in light of the evidence, it's probably more sensible to deduce that.

Midnight Ryder Jones said:

So, since you've stated this as accepted fact several times, it might be a good time to point out that it's highly possible that you invented this rebuild in your head. At no point have the Sox said they are rebuilding. And, moreover, throughout the last four years, they have made innumerable moves that would indicate they are not trying to rebuild (signing Story, Jansen, and Yoshida,, going over the luxury tax, not selling Xander at any point, not selling anyone at any of the trade deadlines. etc.)

In fact, if you were to list the actions you would expect a rebuilding team to take, the Sox have only taken one of them: they've refused to spend big for free agents. If you want to insist that thee only logical explanation for that is they were rebuilding, I guess you can do that. But it's just as sensible for other people to deduce that the reason they aren't spending big on free agents is because they've decided they don't want to spend big on free agents. In fact, in light of the evidence, it's probably more sensible to deduce that.

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Oh.

Los Angeles was always going to match the highest offer and he was always going to Los Angeles. I would think our FO got a read on that and didn't bother getting into the war.

They also may have had an internal limit (250M?) of a guy who does have question marks (height, no MLB pitches), which I can't blame them for.

I would totally be fine if the Sox are waiting to use the 300M+ for Sasaki, but the problem is he now wants to join the Japanese Dodgers next offseason.

I think it could be useful to zoom out a bit on the context of recent inflammatory reports from the Masslive crew, McAdam and Cotillo.

This Red Sox front office doesn’t leak. Reporters, nonetheless, have to regularly file stories.

Without a statement from or on-the-record source from them — and it sounds like the FO isn’t giving them much on background either — reporters are left with inference and analysis. That's what this reporting is. My genuine read is that the Masslive beat writers are frustrated and trying to get the FO to talk, so they’re running this high drama, vaguely sourced, conjecture-driven stories quite obviously fed to them by agents. (If a story has the word “possibly” in the headline like Cotillo’s did yesterday, you know it's pretty thin.)

The whole thing gets more complicated because Masslive — the digital arm of the Springfield Republican, now owned by Condé Nast — has for centuries competed with the Boston Globe, which is of course owned by John Henry. Masslive doesn’t sell digital subscriptions, but it sure does sell digital ads, which are tethered to page views. There’s nothing conspiratorial here, it’s a common digital media business strategy in the 2020s. I would not be surprised if McAdam and Cotillo — who a lot of folks have said they used to like and trust in different outlets — are operating under this editorial strategy, which is why they’ve hit us with this kind of (imo) sensational engagement-bait lately.

Because Masslive is often at the center of this. They also “broke” the (I guess you could call it an) enterprise story last November that candidates were turning the Sox down for the CBO job. I'm not saying it wasn't true — we've cycled through plenty of GMs, so it invites the inquiry. But it seems to me like the kind of story that a reporter crafts in their head before they start making calls to fill out the narrative, and they conveniently omitted a lot of sensible reasons why candidates turned it down, or any context about whether it's typical for such a process.

The stakes are low here. They’re not conjecturing that cuts to the police department budget “...could mean more murders, possibly.” It’s also unfalsifiable. If the Red Sox trade Jansen, or do not sign either nine-figure Boras client starter, a lot of people will believe that this mandated budget narrative they’re pushing is the exact reason why. (In reality, the Sox needed to reset the tax, and left a financial cushion for midseason acquisitions — like Verlander on a $40M annual salary, who Rosenthal reported they made a push for.) If they go the other direction, a lot of people will believe that Sox ownership caved to pressure.

DeadlySplitter said:

Los Angeles was always going to match the highest offer and he was always going to Los Angeles. I would think our FO got a read on that and didn't bother getting into the war.

They also may have had an internal limit (250M?) of a guy who does have question marks (height, no MLB pitches), which I can't blame them for.

I would totally be fine if the Sox are waiting to use the 300M+ for Sasaki, but the problem is he now wants to join the Japanese Dodgers next offseason.

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Lots of good pitching in next year’s FA class, especially if Sasaki comes over. There won’t be any excuse for a team like the Sox not to come away with a guy in the Burnes, Fried, etc. group provided they don’t fully address the need this offseason/season.

BringBackMo said:

You have said variations of this a number of times. Whether you intend it that way or not, it is coming across to other posters as a criticism, essentially that the Red Sox are not spending on free agents the way that they should be and the way that they have done in the past.

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Criticism of other posters, or of the Sox? I guess it ultimately doesn't matter... My concern is that FSG & the FO don't tell us exactly what their plan is, so we're left to figure it out on our own, and the idea that the reason we're compromising on spending compared to revenues or franchise value is that they're saving up for the big splash. I think it's clear that is not the case. They traded Mookie and then fought to reset the tax in 2020, for what? They had a fluky run in 2021, but following that into 2022 the whole issue was that they didn't get under the CBT threshold again while finishing last. And then they got the same finish while resetting the tax (yay?)... We've been considering that the only CBT thresholds that matter are the ones with talent acquisition penalties; financial penalties shouldn't matter since team revenues should cover that... right?

We all need to think again.

BringBackMo said:

To put the question to you again:
How does the pursuit of Yamamoto tell us anything, one way or the other, about how the Red Sox will spend now that they have come out of the rebuild and have announced they are competing? Can you point to other times in Red Sox history when the team has competed for a free agent with the Yankees and come away the winner? If not, then how does failing to sign Yamamoto when both the Yankees and the New Yankees wanted him give us any indication at all of how the Sox will spend on free agents those teams are not pursuing? If you agree that the Sox have many times lost free agent chases to the Yankees, but have spent lots of money on other free agents nonetheless, then what is different about this instance of losing a free agent to the Dodgers?

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That the Sox have not outbid the NYY for a FA is not a matter of not being able to, especially recently as George's kids have been a lot more rational in their spending, and while they're still going past the CBT threshold they are not heads and shoulders above everyone else the way they were in the early augts, when the Sox were the second highest payroll and still ~ $60 - $80M under the NYY.

The YY bidding just follows from the same pattern of establishing cost certainty under the CBT that starts with Mookie being dealt - they couldn't keep adding to the areas of need, and keep Mookie, and get under the CBT taxes, so they dealt Mookie, and since then when have they been in on elite talent? The only big FA they got in a stacked market last year was Story because he was essentially seen as damaged goods and his market collapsed. They didn't pay that for X despite making a lot of noise that he was their top priority (and to be clear, I not only didn't want him at what the Padres wanted, I didn't think he would be worth what he wanted). The last couple seasons they put together an island of misfit toys, maybe hoping for 2013 Redux, but it didn't work out. Now they're supposedly coming out of the rebuild they would never call as such, and we can expect them to spend on elite talent, right? But they didn't really have a credible offer for the only elite player coming into his prime available who also happend to slot into an area of extreme need. My guess is that Ownership likes the low cost vs. risk TB model for pitching. If they're feeling burned by Price and Sale's contracts, then it goes along way towards explaining Blooms approach to pitching, and their draft strategy...

BringBackMo said:

Another question:
Do you think the Yankees and Dodgers also saw Yamamoto as a “Keep your powder dry” free agent target? If so, what would you have liked for the Red Sox to do differently in this process? Can you sketch out an approach that would have resulted in Yamamoto signing here instead of with those two teams that also viewed him as a cornerstone of the future who cost nothing but money?

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I've already spelled this out: they needed to make an offer at the top of the SP market to have a chance. With the Dodgers, both for Ohtani and then YY, they didn't aggressively set the market. In both cases they relied on other teams to make their best offer and then bring them back to the Dodgers to match or just beat. Maybe that would've happened again even if the Sox came in at $370M, but it would've made it a lot harder.

The Dodgers are valued at $4.8B to the Sox at $4.5B; this is close enough that the Sox can compete with them from a resources standpoint. The Sox have reset their tax thresholds and have minimal comitments going forward.

BringBackMo said:

Two final questions:
Why didn’t the Yankees land Yamamoto, given that they appear to have viewed him as a keep your powder dry free agent target?

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As noted above the NYY are not spending like Steinbrenner's Yankees. I think they were also hamstrung by the fact that they own the top SP contract in baseball in Cole, and he can opt out at the end of this coming season. Their offer seems calculated to at least offer the top AAV, while keeping the total value under Cole's.

BringBackMo said:

Do you think the Mets saw Yamamoto as a keep your powder dry free agent? What should they have done differently in order to land him?

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Not been a total disaster in 2023? They were worse than the Sox and jettisoned their win-now short term players.

With any of the YY offers, we're still looking at a pitcher with a lot of risk: he's my size (although with a nod to William Gibson, it's distributed differently) and has never thrown a pitch in MLB, so it's an awful lot to gamble on, but if anyone was going to beat the Dodgers they needed to aggressively make him the top paid SP contract to even have a chance that the Dodgers would decline to match the offer. Both NY teams at least got that point, and the Sox didn't.

DeadlySplitter said:

I would totally be fine if the Sox are waiting to use the 300M+ for Sasaki, but the problem is he now wants to join the Japanese Dodgers next offseason.

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What other than the totally irrational hope of a fan makes you think that the Sox are going to make a $300M offer to any pitcher? If they wouldn't go there to try and get YY, why is Sasaki different?

OCD SS said:

What other than the totally irrational hope of a fan makes you think that the Sox are going to make a $300M offer to any pitcher? If they wouldn't go there to try and get YY, why is Sasaki different?

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Beyond that, Sasaki would be subject to IFA rules similar to Ohtani when he came over. In such a situation, I do think its quite difficult for Boston to win. '

I do agree with you. I'll believe theyre willing to sign elite free agents, when they start actually signing them rather then being loosely connected to them.

OCD SS said:

What other than the totally irrational hope of a fan makes you think that the Sox are going to make a $300M offer to any pitcher? If they wouldn't go there to try and get YY, why is Sasaki different?

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He might be even better than YY and lines up with our timeline more.

It's moot as he will want ot go to the Dodgers for major league minimum in 2025 instead of waiting for 2026.

BigSoxFan said:

Lots of good pitching in next year’s FA class, especially if Sasaki comes over. There won’t be any excuse for a team like the Sox not to come away with a guy in the Burnes, Fried, etc. group provided they don’t fully address the need this offseason/season.

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My understanding is if the Marines do let Sasaki out of his contract he would be considered a amateur free agent, which in turn would benefit teams that don’t incur any spending penalties. Not saying this is a reason not to go over the tax line, however I do wonder if Breslow is keeping this in the back of his mind.

OCD SS said:

The Dodgers are valued at $4.8B to the Sox at $4.5B; this is close enough that the Sox can compete with them from a resources standpoint. The Sox have reset their tax thresholds and have minimal comitments going forward.

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Those franchise values are sourced directly from the ass of some guy at Forbes. If both teams came up for auction right now, I'd eat my hat if the sales prices were that close. The Dodgers bring in three times as much revenue from local TV as the Red Sox. They have a much larger ballpark and sell more tickets than the Red Sox could if they sold out every game again. There's no way someone would pay that much of a premium for owning a tourist destination.

It also means that expecting the Red Sox to even be able to match free agent offers from them is unrealistic, never mind casually throwing out an extra 30% in yearly pay to "show they're serious."

TubeSoxs said:

My understanding is if the Marines do let Sasaki out of his contract he would be considered a amateur free agent,

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Not fulfilling your contract doesn't seem a SemperFi thing to do though.

chawson said:

I don’t know, this seems a little bit too colored by Story’s hurt/tough time in Boston.

Story put up a 15.8 fWAR in the four seasons before hitting free agency. That ranks 65th of all MLB players this century, above Bryce Harper, Corey Seager, Dansby Swanson, Derek Jeter, and Carlos Correa in their age-corresponding seasons (25-28). Story even lost three-fifths of a season in 2020, and he’d be roughly 50th on that list if he hadn’t.

Damon had a bad season the year we signed him, hitting .256/.324/.363. His Sox days were heroic, but he was much worse than Story by fWAR over their preceding seasons.

Anyway, not to digress too much, but Story was absolutely a star-caliber player — to the degree that that can be objectively measured — when we signed him.

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Yes, Story had played at a high level in Colorado, though his numbers dipped significantly his last year there, and there was already info that his arm was compromised/hurt. So at the time they got him he had yellow flags. It was not like signing Seager, it was a guy who had had a very good career but with indications of offensive decline and injury.

OCD SS said:

My concern is that FSG & the FO don't tell us exactly what their plan is, so we're left to figure it out on our own, and the idea that the reason we're compromising on spending compared to revenues or franchise value is that they're saving up for the big splash

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That you think the Red Sox ought to tell us exactly what their plan is may explain some of your frustrations.

OCD SS said:

That the Sox have not outbid the NYY for a FA is not a matter of not being able to, especially recently as George's kids have been a lot more rational in their spending, and while they're still going past the CBT threshold they are not heads and shoulders above everyone else

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Your stated opinion here—that the Red Sox have in their history never won a free agent contest with the Yankees is not a matter of being unable to—is curious. It would mean that in the entire history of the organization, the Sox have never had an owner with the intestinal fortitude to simply do what is necessary to stare down the Yankees and get the job done. The fact is that the Yankees have always enjoyed a massive advantage in both revenues and market appeal. They enjoy this advantage over the rest of baseball, of course, not just the Red Sox. Or at least they did. Now there’s a team in LA that has taken over the top spot.

OCD SS said:

They traded Mookie and then fought to reset the tax in 2020, for what?

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OCD SS said:

starts with Mookie being dealt - they couldn't keep adding to the areas of need, and keep Mookie, and get under the CBT taxes, so they dealt Mookie,

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It seems as though another source of your frustration is that they traded Mookie.

OCD SS said:

I've already spelled this out: they needed to make an offer at the top of the SP market to have a chance

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OCD SS said:

Maybe that would've happened again even if the Sox came in at $370M, but it would've made it a lot harder.

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In sum and substance, even you accept that the Red Sox were very unlikely to have ever signed Yamamoto. You believe, correctly, that he was a keep your powder dry kind of FA target, but you recognize that other big market teams recognized that as well. You are frustrated that the Sox didn’t do what the Mets did, which was submit a bid that could be shopped to the Dodgers. Your gripe seems to be that If they’d done that, it would have made it “a lot harder” for the Dodgers to claim their prize.

OCD SS said:

Not been a total disaster in 2023? They were worse than the Sox and jettisoned their win-now short term players

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So the reason the Mets didn’t land Yamamoto is not because he was never going to play there and was simply getting their highest offer for the Dodgers to match…but because the Mets were a total disaster in 2023? Following this logic, if the Mets had made the playoffs last season, Yamamoto would not have shopped their offer to the Dodgers, he would have signed with them because they offered him the most money. Is that your actual opinion? I am quite skeptical that the Mets’ 2023 performance had anything to do with Yamamoto not signing there.

Midnight Ryder Jones said:

So, since you've stated this as accepted fact several times, it might be a good time to point out that it's highly possible that you invented this rebuild in your head. At no point have the Sox said they are rebuilding. And, moreover, throughout the last four years, they have made innumerable moves that would indicate they are not trying to rebuild (signing Story, Jansen, and Yoshida,, going over the luxury tax, not selling Xander at any point, not selling anyone at any of the trade deadlines. etc.) And, given the amount of talent on the 2019 team, anyone who would've suggested that it was time to initiate a rebuild at that point would have been considered insane.

In fact, if you were to list the actions you would expect a rebuilding team to take, the Sox have only taken one of them: they've refused to spend big for free agents. If you want to insist that thee only logical explanation for that is they were rebuilding, I guess you can do that. But it's just as sensible for other people to deduce that the reason they aren't spending big on free agents is because they've decided they don't want to spend big on free agents. In fact, in light of the evidence, it's probably more sensible to deduce that.

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This is even more in line with their stated goals - rebuild, but also try to field a competitive team while doing so via short duration FA signings. With a couple of longer ones thrown in as opportune.

YTF said:

Which is it?

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I don't think they are cheap. I think they suffer from analysis paralysis in some respect after having to stomach some really bad deals and decisions in the past several years. I think they made what they thought was a competitive offer to YY, but it likely turned out to be far less than the other teams. I assume that because they have not leaked it out yet.