Agreed. "Last place" finish, while true, doesn't quite capture things, as the AL East has been an absolute monster division for the past few years. This team probably would be middle of the pack in almost any other division, which, while not great, looks a lot less worse, if that makes sense.
They made an offer to Eovaldi. One he turned down and then reportedly came back to see if it was still on the table, but they'd spent the money already. Timing matters.
One of the underappreciated things from the Bloom era was his ability to move off his mistakes. Specifically Diekman and Barnes. There are many baseball ops guys that would have let those situations get worse.
That is troubling, matches what we see, and sounds like a Cora problem, as well as maybe a team culture problem.
The SoxProspects boys theorized on today's podcast that Bloom was too rigid in his valuations on trades/acquisitions which led to the appearance of indecisiveness. They posit that he was not getting the deal he wanted, and so didn't take deals that were still good values and good moves for the team.
To add on a bit to this (because I agree), one of the things I don't think Chaim was ever able to prove that he was able to get in those excess value guys. He was really good at getting 1 WAR or 2 WAR type players on a discount or from the bargain bin, but at some point contending teams need to have players who contribute more than that. I think in Bloom's three full seasons the best "newly acquired" single season performance was Hernandez in 2021. I like Bloom so I bet he could, but that improvement from 0 WAR to 2 WAR type guys needs to also have bigger producers in there to push a team beyond that point. That long ways is getting more production for some of those positional spots - especially if the rotation isn't filled with plus arms. Like...you don't need Acuna or Ohtani to win but a few guys who can produce at an all-star caliber level are often needed to push a team that way.
Two teams that were (a) starting from a much stronger position in terms of minor league talent in 2020; and (b) were patient enough to allow their prospects to move through the system until the reached the major league and AAA levels. Unclear the farm systems of either team would be better than the Sox in 2025. Just that Henry & Co did not want to wait that long.
I think this is pretty standard. Just looking around the league: the White Sox cleaned house last month, and last year, the Rangers and Tigers fired their GM's in August and the Royals fired theirs in September.
If you are crediting them for being in a tough division, don’t you also have to deduct for having one the largest revenues?
Having early first round picks to get their top three prospects and star catcher might've helped there too for Baltimore.
Therein hangs the tale.
The Rays beat almost everyone, regardless of payroll. I don't know how they do it, but they do.
Their payroll is 90m less than New York for the same number of wins and 30m less than Toronto, Baltimore is obscenely cost controlled because they were trash for a half decade, and we were trying to get a Tampa type development system going but they just canned the dude trying to get there?
The Sox got some nice players from their recent first round picks and Bloom has been criticized in this thread for picking the right players. Go figure.
I don't really get this take.
Yeah, I don't get it. Like, kudos to Baltimore for getting those names right too, but Baltimore is where they're at largely because they were among the worst teams in baseball from 2017-2021. This is the first year they've been first in the East since 2014, and the second since 1997.
Yeah, so much of the debate here is how Bloom handled decisions which amounted to acquiring complementary players, on the theory that if you have enough decent guys everywhere you can hang with the top teams. And the answer is, sure, yeah, you can, it's baseball. But a much clearer pathway to success is a core of young, elite guys (Bal, TB, Atl) or even prime age elite guys (Mookie). By all appearances Bloom's plan was to accumulate talent and either hope some of them hit that level, or that some guys on that level become available at a time when you have either the prospects or the cap room to get them. Devers has flirted with that level and maybe Bello and/or Casas get there. Teel, Mayer and Anthony have those sorts of ceilings (but tbd). The cap room is there if Soto hits the market.
This is 100% a strawman. No one is "criticizing" him for it, there are some who don't give him a ton of credit for picking the extremely obvious player that fell to him (Mayer and Teel).
Yeah, I thought their use of the word "inflexible" was a really valid criticism of Bloom (as opposed to the "indecisive" narratives which I think are bad). & they gave some good examples like going into '22 without a RF which I hated at the time, too.
So, what does it matter if they were "diamonds in the rough" or "no brainer selections"? Nobody is saying Baltimore should take off 10 wins because they drafted some obvious players when they had a number of high draft picks a few years in a row. If Mayer and Teel work out, how or why they were drafted will be nothing more than a footnote.
This is taking what I posted in a completely different direction and still doesnt address that your original point was a complete fabrication. Who in the hell is "criticizing" Chaim for taking Mayer and Teel? Or Roman Anthony?
Two prospects. Neither of which look like they will amount to much, but that's the nature of the game.
Two prospects, correct....and the reason he got those prospects was because he took on a bad contract. The bad contract which isn't being mentioned in multiple posts that are talking about other posters being "obsessed" with Renfroe and that it wasn't that bad of a trade.
Difference obviously is that one great football draft can turn a franchise around in a span of months, while a great MLB draft takes a few years before guys start showing up at high levels of the minors generally. Two great NFL drafts in a row can make a 7-10 team a legit Super Bowl contender in like 15 months.
The deal would have been better had they also made a second deal to acquire an actual RF for a team that was coming off an ALCS appearance. Water under the bridge, so be it.
Agreed on all points here. He was mostly good at finding diamonds in the rough. Quick examples are Wacha, Schrieber, Whitlock, Bernadino, and if you want to throw in Pivetta I'll grant you him too. The catching tandem of Wong/McGuire is another example. They could possibly have something in Urias and maybe Pablo Reyes but at the end of the day are these guys making a big difference in being a playoff team or not? No they're not. There's a ceiling on your team if you're constantly relying on low-cost, high-reward(or oft-injured guys and relying on them staying healthy) players to be mainstays on the team. Eventually, you need some upper level talents to lead the roster and have those diamonds in the rough to supplement the roster. Now in Bloom's defense, how many offseasons did he have the opportunity to spend money to get that talent? His free agent signings in terms of outside the organization went from the Story deal then a Grand Canyon-sized chasm to the Kenley deal. They just did not spend a lot in FA since he got here plus they didn't really have the level of prospect capital needed to trade for plus arms until this offseason. At the end of the day, the level of talent at the major league level was not consistently good enough to contend for playoff spots in his time here. The results are the results and I'm really not sure how better of a position the organization is than where it was in 2019 when he got here. In some areas, it's improved but at the big league level there's a lot of work to do. It starts with acquiring 2 top level starting pitchers and then goes from there.
Just throwing out there that both years they had a ridiculous number of injuries to the point where you are penciling in Franchy Cordero to 53 games at 1b and starting Conor Seabold, Austin Davis, and a carousel of mediocre openers. These weren't plans. These were contingencies after your original contingencies also ended in injury. Both seasons saw the Sox with four SPs out at the same time. Who is anyone's ninth starter?
I think this is just the way things are in the post-Covid world, NY started the season with their 8th and 9th SP options in the rotation this season and currently have a full pitching staff (5 starters and 8 relievers) on the IL (details if you want them on the most recent post in the NY roster 2023 thread), and TB has had more pitching injuries this season than either NY or BOS.
Yep, but still, those Tampa injuries transformed them from a team that was playing .700 ball (51-22) to a team that has gone 5 games over .500 since. They were better equipped to survive the injuries because healthy Tampa was a heavy AL favorite.
This is a fair (and I think true) point. But a comprehensive analysis of the MiL system wasn't what I was getting at.
To be fair to Bloom, he took Roman Anthony in the 2nd round and two of the 1st round prospects were clear Freidman/Bloom types who weren't necessarily the industry consensus (Nick Yorke and Mikey Romero)
FWIW, I'd love to see a compare and contrast to other teams's top 10 in the first round arena. Plenty of work has been done to show that a ridiculous amount of major leaguers are first rounders. It might be news that five of their top ten aren't first rounders.
First, I don't know where Sox Prospect is getting 5 Sox guys as first rounders from @ShaneTrot's post. Mayer, Teel, and Yorke are the only three on their own list. Romero is a 4th on other lists but is 18th on their ranking - so I think SoxProspects doesn't know their own list. I guess if you include all four of those and Casas but Casas is graduated and you'd never have Teel in that case.
Do we have any idea about how the Red Sox pay vs. other organizations? I could see someone good making the jump, if the financial incentives are worth it. And it's not necessarily a death knell to get fired by these guys given what we saw with DD. I bet Chaim resurfaces pretty quickly. May take a few years to get another GM job but I'd be surprised if he never gets another one (assuming that is what he wants).
My comment was in direct response to the assertion that Bloom was not talented when it came to identifying prospects to bring into the organization. It had nothing to do with how his decisions fit within a broader roster construction strategy. If you want to have *that* conversation, then a good place to start would be recognizing that being both a seller and a buyer in the same deadline--trading away some players and not others--is likely the result of being asked to both rebuild an organization and compete for championships at the same time. Confusing demands can result in confusing moves.
My goodness. No matter how many times it is debunked on this board, the "Bloom didn't try to re-sign Eovaldi" narrative will not die. Eovaldi received a good offer from the Sox. How good? When he couldn't beat it anywhere else, he came back asking for it to be offered to him again. By then the Sox had used the money elsewhere. Eovaldi is not on the Red Sox because of *his* miscalculation, not Bloom's.
