Then they were all wrong. Including Bloom.
Bloom built this mess. He needs to fix it now. That means making changes, and big ones. If that means punting Dalbec into the sun, so be it.
It's never ever ever EVER acceptable to throw up one's hands and say "maybe they'll snap out of it." No. This is very possibly the worst Sox offense of all time in the modern era, and it simply cannot continue. That means players, coaches and yes GMs could lose their jobs. That's the deal. Always has been.
As much as I wish it were possible, I don't see how it can just be "fixed now." There are some things the team could possibly do that might help, but it's far from a guarantee of a fix and some of the possible solutions have significant costs attached to them. I don't follow the minors closely enough to have an opinion about whether it would be wise to bring up Duran or Casas, so I'll stay agnostic on that. But firing Bloom seems absolutely insane to me. I don't see how that would fix anything this season and could easily compromise the organizational plan. What GM would want to work here if they had to worry that they'd get fired if the team sucked for a month? It only makes sense to fire people if it will actually help fix the problem.
I think what Bloom failed to account for is that the offense in general fell off rather drastically after the ASB last season, and needed far larger improvement than what we got in order to remain competitive.
What's depressing is the complete non-competitiveness of so many ABs. There's zero plate discipline, zero game awareness, and zero ability to bear down and drive in a run when needed. We saw a lot of this same thing last season as well, which makes me wonder about the mental makeup of the club. Is there a sports psychologist on staff for the team?
Your first claim just isn't correct. Maybe the data from fangraphs is wrong, but here is what they have for the Sox last year:
- 1st Half: .326 wOBA/102 wRC+/.753 OPS
- 2nd Half: .341 wOBA/112 wRC+/.798 OPS
I absolutely agree that plate discipline is a huge problem. Looking at the statcast data it's the most glaring issue with the team, and could be why the team is also making such bad contact. I 100% agree with you that simple "wait and see" isn't a good approach, and I also agree with you that the quality of the opposition, weather, balls etc. are not a good enough explanation to wave away the Sox's offense. Like you said, many teams have dealt with the weather and ball quality and are performing better than the Sox. Offense is down across MLB, but not nearly as much as it is for the Sox. Quality of opposition does matter, but not enough to accept the garbage that we've been witnessing.
As far as "ability to bear down and drive in a run when needed" goes, is that even a thing? Like, players can just decide to hit better when there are men on base or the game is close? How does that work? Personally if I were a coach and I found out that my players were choosing to hit better when there were men on base I'd be kinda pissed. Why can't you just hit like that all the time? I get that perhaps some players are clutch and some players aren't, but I don't think that it's a choice or a skill that has been intentionally learned.
I also don't buy the argument made by quite a few people that the problem lies with Dalbec and JBJ. Yes, Dalbec and JBJ are not good and even I (who put a good amount of trust in Bloom) was scratching my head about going into the season with him JBJ starting in right. I was a bit more agnostic on Dalbec.
Regardless, how soon we forget that just last season the Red Sox routinely trotted out several players who were awful on offense and still as a team managed to perform really well. In the first half, the Red Sox handed 772 PA to Marwin Gonzalez, Danny Santana, Franchy Cordero, Bobby Dalbec, and Michael Chavis, plus another 381 to Christian Vazquez, Kevin Plawecki, and Connor Wong. That's out of a total of 3,425 PA. So roughly a third of the teams plate appearances were going to offensive black holes. Also recall that neither Kike nor Renfroe were actually good out of the gate. Both really started the season slow, with Kike posting a slugging heavy .671 in March/April and Renfroe offering a putrid .485 (!!!). Kike improved some in May and June and then really took off in July, and Renfroe had a great May before settling in to being solid after that.
Last year, the team trotted out a lot of dreck in March/April. But they managed to do well because of a combination of luck and JD (1.175), X (.915), Devers (.958), and Verdugo (.863) carrying the team.
The bottom half of our lineup this year looks a lot like it did last year, only corrected for the overall lower offensive environment. The real difference is at the top, where X is the only player pulling weight at .919. Devers (who many of you were clamoring to throw 300 million at) is OPSing .776. JD has been OK but has still only managed .825 in limited playing time. Verdugo is at .653 despite a hot start. Both Kike and Story are under .600.
So yeah, the bottom of our lineup has been awful but JD, Devers and Verdugo have all lost more than .200 of OPS versus their March/April performance last year.
If those numbers reflect what we are going to get from Devers, Verdugo, JD, Kike, and Story this season then this team simply isn't going to do well.
Regarding the arguments that the team came into the season without clearly defined roles etc., I'd argue that the same was even more true last year. Going into last season, the only really solid outfield spot was Verdugo, with the other two positions being split between Kike, Marwin, Renfroe, Franchy etc. The bullpen didn't exactly have a super clear-cut structure either, although I'll admit that at least it was presumed that Barnes would be the closer. First base was still Chavis/Dalbec/???.
So what do I think the team should be doing now? I don't have a good, specific answer to that question aside from trying to figure out if there is something systemic going on that is causing the whole team to drag. The most likely candidate is the plate discipline, but it's unclear to me what would be causing that problem. I'm inclined to think that the scrutiny should start with the hitting coach and spread from there. These aren't the kinds of problems that are going to be fixed by personnel changes quickly enough to save the season.