Yes. It's a stupid argument.
Let's look at what happened. At the close of 2019 the Sox had an aging club of injured high-priced players who could not compete. They also had no talent in the upper minors expected for several years. That's what changed. It's not like they decided to junk the team overnight.
Take a look:
View: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1l9hPh7ITusWGngIWJdPqwN_kL5e9ci_ygCsg9ng02LM/edit#gid=573401688
and:
https://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/BOS/2019.shtml
It's not a disaster of a team if you're dazzled by names. But then you see they only won 84 games.
Oh, and it's also the most expensive club in MLB, with gimpy starting pitching in Sale and Price. And to keep it together you'll have to sign Betts and Boegarts. And there is NO ONE in the minors who is going to contribute anything to the ML club in the next couple of years - Dalbec or Sam Travis is your 1B. If you get lucky.
So, if you have half-a-brain as a GM or owner, you don't throw money away on the premium years of a couple of high-end FAs; because that would mean you're wasting those years during the rebuild/restock, and getting stuck with the back end of those deals when you're hoping to be competitive. It's the Ohtani/Trout Angels model.
What you
can do is grit your teeth, hold onto your MiL talent, draft well, trade to get younger. You send off some talent (Betts) to carry away bad cash (Price). Meanwhile you extend your SS (Boegarts) and hope your key pitcher (Sale) recovers. You spread your budget around to try to get FA players that will keep you in the hunt if things break right (2021) or aren't derailed by insane amounts of injuries (2022.) Those are going to be short-term contracts (Perez, Richards, Moreland, Paxton, Wacha, Renfroe, Strahm, Hernandez, Hill, Diekman, Kluber, Duval, Jansen, Martin, Turner), or trade for rentals like Schwarber. Sometimes you rehab guys, sometimes you overpay guys to avoid having a stable of longer contracts. You also look ahead to the 23-24-25-26 window and grab impact players for longer terms if you can - Trevor Story in 2022. Yoshida in 2023.
You always try to trade nothing (Benintendi/Hembree) for something (Winckowski/Pivetta) and grab what longer-term controllable talent you can. Sometimes (Renfroe for JBJ/Binelas/Hamilton) it does not work out. But most of the time it does: Pivetta, Winckowski, Whitlock, Schreiber, Jacques, Abreu, Valdez, Bernardino, Reyes, Campbell. And that,
plus your minors finally bearing fruit (Bello, Casas, Houck, Crawford, Duran, Dalbec, Murphy) -
that gets you your core for your next window.
If the 2021-23 teams had a healthy Sale, they're within striking distance. If he's a gimp, you've got to replace him, then add pieces on top of that. It worked in one of the 3 years. It might have worked for 2 of the 3 but the injury bug bit everyone in 2022.
Part of that failure to compete may have been Bloom's unwillingness to do another Schwarber-like deal in 2022 or 2023. . .but even there, McGuire, Abreu, and Valdez are useful pieces just one year later for the corpses of Deikman and Vazquez.
I think they made a good run of it. 2020 was a punt year in many ways. 2021 was glorious. 2022 was a health train wreck as much as 2006 was. 2023 was not good, but I think they underplayed.
With 20/20 hindsight, maybe they trade Sale and commit to a 2020-21 rebuild. Maybe they extend Mookie and let Devers walk. But if they kicked Sale to the curb immediately, they'd still have the problem of the talent gap in the upper minors from 2019-2022 or so (Casas wasn't getting here faster). And so maybe that's "worse" and we don't even get a single year of competition for Betts' prime years.
But they weren't spoiled for choice, and you cannot premium-FA your way into a broad and controllable talent depth on a club without a couple of losing seasons to firesale off FAs for younger talent.
Mostly, they made very good FA signings to plug holes, and some truly excellent trades. They didn't deal off significant MiL assets, and so today have a talent base to build on.
So I'm fine with it.
No,
you argued they're Tamper Bay Noath. Literally.
Because they didn't sign two FAs whose hearts were set on the Dodgers.
And yes, they
will spend on complimentary and over-the-top FAs to take a club with a talent-base into competition.