That’s fair. And I agree with @Petagine in a Bottle , it’s mostly about pitching.
The 60 game 2020 shouldn't really be counted. And, as mentioned upthread, 2021 was a pretty great run.
That's probably true, but listing those two players is a bit selective. Xander got $280 million and Correa $200M this off-season as well. Even Baez got $140M. Big ticket free agent signings are incredibly risky at every position.
He certainly wouldn't have been fired.
Lots of respect for your perspective but I think too much attention is given to how much a team spends on salary, and spending money just because you can can easily be as disastrous as not spending, even more so. There are 20+ fan bases out there now who want their owners to spend hundreds of millions on Yamamoto, but he’s not a sure thing to be great going forward, no one is.
I'm not sure what that has to do with my point. They could choose to spend it all on 1-year guys if they want. They could eat other teams' bad salaries to accrue prospects. There are definitely discussions to be had about philosophy & optimal payroll allocation. But as long as they are under $277m next year, the only punishment is financial.
That’s not really true, for instance signing guys to 1/8 or 1/10 deals means you’re filling a roster spot with a player who can’t be optioned, hurting your roster flexibility. That’s not a punishment but it can impact a team adversely. One reason for BAL and TB’s success is fewer guaranteed contracts/guaranteed roster spots, guys perform or they’re replaced.
Yeah, I left them a $7m buffer, but they can have a bit more if they want. It will actually probably be a bit lower than that due to the way a lot of contracts are structured with playing time incentives.
That's definitely not the type of player they should be adding, no. That's what they've been forced to do the last few years while straddling the tax line.
I get that the impression of "not having a plan" while they were trying to achieve multiple goals of remaining competitive, rebuilding a barren farm, and resetting the tax to avoid punishment. And it's reinforced with not being either a buyer or a fireseller. I've had this conversation with some pretty smart people. You're a seller or a buyer. You either shoot the moon or throw everything overboard that's not tied down. I just think that it's pretty myopic. After the first round getting pick #7 vs. pick #15 really doesn't mean anything. Frankly even in the first round it doesn't really. And as far as hosing the deadlines, do we really think that this team would be way better off with a few more AAAA 25yo outfielders that some other team was fine to part with to solve their own 40-man logjam? Is that where Bloom fell down, or is that just another talking point? Doesn't really seem material to me.
You'd think listening to talk radio that this ownership group hasn't spent money.
I've harped on this a bunch, but I think there's too much attention paid to the one-year acquisitions as though they're supposed to be primary solutions. They're not just that. They're placeholders for young players we want to acclimate at the major league level.
No... but they could have added some more young flyer pitchers.
Yeah I suppose that an argument can be made for adding a bunch of AAAA pitches to the pile and getting a jump on AAAA position player DFAs wouldn't hurt. Hit rate being low anyway, more is better. But is that the reason why anyone should look askance at Bloom?
Who are the people who thought JBJ was the target of that trade? If there are any, they’re in the minority, at least on this board. Most everyone here knew that was a buy prospects move while hoping to squeeze a little productivity out of JBJ.
Hard to buy that one either. Why would the Rangers want that out there with how things with Sale played out?
No, my personal entertainment when writing about Greenville's 15th best pitcher is not his job lol
Yeah I just went back and read that thread. Most posters were gaga over the trade because the Sox took on salary for better prospects. A few posters hated it because a) they were mediocre prospects from a bad system and b) fear of JBJ. Those posters were right on basically both points. You could argue the JBJ $ piece directly led to not being able to get under the cap in 2022. So it was really a triple whammy of bad: bad performance from JBJ, prospects that won’t pan out, and financial implications. Ugh.
So many of the post-Bloom media takes have been "Henry refuses to spend!" that it makes me feel like I'm missing something, because I look at the full Bloom era and can't see a time when it would have made any sense to do so. I feel like they've been planning on opening up the wallet for this winter's FA pitching crop for years now. So I agree, if they cheap out now then the ownership criticisms are 100% valid, but until then they feel awfully premature to me.
There isn't one "true" way to build a contender but I have to make two points:
. . . one of the great benefits of tanking is that a team can play guys like Duran or Santander day-after-day to figure out if they have major league ability without consequence.
There’s no such thing as “the Rangers”. The team didn’t put out a press release through their PR department.
I will retire real quick if the guys like Nate Tellier & Aaron Perry ever make it into my top 200.
I’d be curious to know how many teams have, say, made an LCS more than once within a few years after their tanking process ended.
The Braves just won the NL East for the sixth year in a row. What are they not doing?
Yes of course, and I was among them. But that's not my point. I'm saying that JBJ was not the target to take over right field. The real bet was that Duran, or to a lesser extent Cordero, would seize the job.
Yup. It made some sense conceptually but one of Binelas or Hamilton needed to pan out to something useful at MLB level to make it worth it. Odds are heavily against both.
The Cubs tanked and won a WS. Some say that ATL tanked as well. Here's an article that attempts to address your question: https://calltothepen.com/2021/12/01/tanking-mlb-strategy/
Well, as I said, they didn’t compete while they were rebuilding. The three years before that they lost 90, 93, and 95 games. They tanked for 3 years and that set them up for this run .
I think the team looks remarkably different with a healthy Story at SS for a full season, and a solid CF (Hernandez/Duran) for a full season. That does not entirely address the "fundamentals" issues (which I agree are a real problem), but it would cut down on some of the errors. Then, maybe, you have more pitching to weak contact, and starters go deeper in games. Once that happens, you've got a 90+ win team on your hands, with just a few changes in player-personnel.
92.
Been thinking about this in the context of all the times we heard "Actually, the Red Sox offered [Free Agent X] more money, but..." or "The Red Sox nearly had a deal in place for [Player Y], but..." If other people around the league just didn't like the guy, then maybe it actually was a factor, and maybe that's why other teams were willing to leak stuff - we're still reading about things like that alleged Sale trade after the fact.
0%. The park would be empty, and the TV ratings would be near zero. It’s a silly premise for the Sox.
Well, the draft is now a lottery, so you can't deep-tank and rely on picking up a couple of #1-3 picks anymore. And the Sox can't get consecutive top 6 picks, as they're a big-market team. So you're tanking for a 1-6, plus a 7 at best.
I'll take the under on that.
Agree on Story but not sure what you are getting at with Duran. Yes, he was better in the field this year than he was in 22’, but that’s only because he was unplayably bad last year.
Fair point - you can swap in Rafaela if you want. I'd note though that Duran's made a huge leap forward, mostly because, per various reports, he's gotten better coaching on how to play CF. So he's probably not done growing as a fielder.
I’ll be honest, if we purposefully tanked and lost 110 games for the last 4 years I wouldn’t be a baseball fan anymore.I'll take the under on that.
But with regards to your last paragraph - it totally makes sense and I see where you (and others) are coming from but if Bloom had come in and declared a full tank and traded Mookie and Sale and everyone else and the Red Sox had lost 110 games (or the COVID equivalent) for the last four years but come out of it with probably a handful of really good prospects, would our position as fans be any different than it is now?
Yes the 2021 Red Sox were great but I'd certainly trade that season for where the Os are right now.
With the new rules regarding draft position, not so sure I would be OK with that. And the Sox have a good mix of prospects in the middle tiers of the minor leagues.I'll take the under on that.
But with regards to your last paragraph - it totally makes sense and I see where you (and others) are coming from but if Bloom had come in and declared a full tank and traded Mookie and Sale and everyone else and the Red Sox had lost 110 games (or the COVID equivalent) for the last four years but come out of it with probably a handful of really good prospects, would our position as fans be any different than it is now?
Yes the 2021 Red Sox were great but I'd certainly trade that season for where the Os are right now.
Here's a question that maybe belongs in another thread but relates to what you say: Has baseball changed in a way that makes acquiring FA SPs much harder? Specifically the emphasis on high-effort, high velocity pitching leaves very few reliable arms available into their 30s. The early lockup contracts are one factor, skimming a few elite guys off the market. And the ones left are guys like Snell, Rodon, etc., guys who have injury concerns or velocity drops from the early wear and tear. Bloom doesn't literally "love injured guys" as mentioned above, he was a GM of a team that needed starters off the market and there were never enough uninjured FAs worth the cost.
I think it's a really exploitative system that shouldn't exist. But the fact is it does, so it's a system you need to operate within.
Great question, I think the answer is definitely yes. There are fewer starters in general (with the move towards openers), fewer good starters in general, I think, so fewer good free agent starters- and like you said, they all come with flaws. Bloom did a pretty good job, i suspect, at signing free agent starters- Kluber was the only real bust even if most guys he got were only average-ish.
It'll be interesting to see how your point plays out with the pitch clock. One reason games got so long was analytics. Someone figured out that taking more time between pitches allowed hurlers to throw harder for sustained periods. Now that starters can't do this anymore, maybe the injury trend will reverse itself.
This is a big piece! Pitching now is max effort all the time, so injuries are way more prevalent. And far more often than in previous generations, elite production is more often the result of customized performance training systems (sometimes conducted privately by the player) than “true talent.”
