However, that fits with the narrative that's been building since Farrell first started managing the Jays: he has more than the usual trouble helping prospects become MLB contributors, and young players do not appear to perform well consistently under his oversight, regardless of prospect status or minor-league predictive indicators.
The Sox are still a young team, with <3 year AST players expected to perform relatively key roles as pitchers (Smith, Rodriguez, Wright, Owens) and especially as hitters (Betts, Bogaerts, Bradley, Shaw, Holt, Vazquez, Swihart). And the Sox NEED to remain a relatively young team going forward, because the team looks forward to 7 players combining to eat over $125MM in salary (Price, Ramirez, Porcello, Price, Kimbrel, Pedroia, and Castillo) in each of the next 3 years. Hopefully, five of these will remain solid contributors or better.
Which means for the Sox to be competitive for the next 3 years, the other 18-22 players on the active roster -- most of them young players already in the organization -- will need to do better collectively at taking their next steps than they did taking their first steps under Farrell, and also better than the Jays top young players did under Farrell (Arencibia, Rasmus, Snider, Lawrie, d'Arnaud, Drabek, Morrow, Cecil, etc.).
From 2011-2012, the Jays busted on their top-10 MLB prospects, top-25 MLB prospects, hitting prospects, catching prospects, and pitching prospects. Now, lots of prospects don't make it in MLB, but the extent of the futility perhaps this should be taken as something of a cautionary tale regardless, given how the Sox young players have collectively tended to underperform expectations. And especially given how much better Stroman, Sanchez, and Osuna have looked than Morrow, Drabek, and Cecil ever did pitching for Farrell.
So yeah, regardless of x's and o's or media management skills, I do think it's notable that the Red Sox' young players have generally played better baseball, with markedly more enthusiasm, under Lovullo's brief tenure during garbage time, than they have under Farrell while still in contention.