The can't pull the plug now. The whole point of the past 4 years has been to get to 2024/25.
Agreed. My original vote was that he would be fired sometime during the 2024 season. If I had to vote again today I might push that back to the 2024 offseason. Either way I don't think he's in charge of the 2025 Red Sox.
If next year is like this year (or last year) then the Red Sox are in a lot of trouble. And so is Bloom, no matter whether Henry bought the ride ticket or not.
All depends on what Bloom does to shore up the rotation and bullpen between now and then, IMO. I’m done with the bargain-hunting. They need to sign some legit top-line talent (it’s unfortunately a weak free agent class for pitchers but Urias is a solid option even though he’s having a bit of a down year so far) and/or use some of their growing stockpile of prospects to trade for some.
https://www.masslive.com/redsox/2023/06/mlb-notebook-trade-deadline-may-put-red-sox-in-uncomfortable-place-mcadam.html
Does a good portion of the fan base really believe this? At best 50% of SoSH does. I can’t imagine the general fanbase looks at this franchise and thinks they are anywhere close to contending. Half the names on the roster aren’t recognizable. It’s like Major League.
What ownership really should be concerning themselves with is that the size of the general fan base is most certainly shrinking. Sure payroll is down, but revenue has to be way down as well.
Attendance is down another 3-4% from last year (32,400 to 31,250), which was down materially (15%+) from the pre-COVID times (35-36k). I dont think Henry is going to sit by and let attendance continue to slip. If they follow the second half of last year and there are some pretty empty August/September games, there will be serious discussions about the future.
They will have money to spend. If the whole purpose was to save money, (responding to some other folks) then how do we explain the Devers extension, the Story contract and the Yoshida signing? What about the offer to Bogaerts? They bring in like $500m in a good year, so presumably they are more than breaking even no matter what. This is the same ownership group that has spent near the top of the list every year for two decades, which have been the best two decades since WWI. Why does "they're just cheap now" make more sense than "they are clearing space to regain flexibility for another run"?
Im not sure what post you meant to respond to but this post doesn’t really follow the one that you quoted
Should we be? This team hits a little and has a decent bullpen. Other than that, the starting pitching is horrendous and the defense is T-ball quality. The injuries have hurt but all teams have injuries. Do we have a young core that anyone is excited about? I like Bello and Wong but is anyone excited about Casas, Duran, and Whitlock these days?
I'm puzzled as to why any of the fan base would think 2025 is THE year. Where is their championship-caliber starting pitching going to come from? Bello and who else exactly? Houck and Whitlock continue to do little to inspire confidence. Murphy and Walters are fringe prospects getting torched in AAA. Mata can't throw strikes. Wikelman is a long-range project who can't throw strikes in A ball. Drohan is a back end starter. Coffey looks fairly promising but wasn't even on the radar before the season started. We could have signed one of two frontline starters we already had for a reasonable rate - Wacha and Eovaldi - but we punted and went with a washed up Kluber instead.
At the risk of sounding more cynical than I mean to come off:
Just so we're clear, since tone doesn't come through writing, I have a pretty low opinion of Bloom. I have no idea why people think that 2025 is going to be such a great year other than the hope that Mayer is the second coming of A-Rod (and not a bust unreasonably carrying the hopes of a fanbase as a savior), the rest of the prospects pan out and ownership decides to open their wallets, particularly for pitching and Ohtani. Personally, I don't see it but a lot of the people on this board do.
Because this is the mantra of literally every Bloomer on this and every other board. That the years of shit that we're going through now are going to be worth it in 2025. It's always 2025.
I don't think we should envy the Yankees because they were in the ALCS last year (and got swept, of course, probably due to the shock of making it past round 1). We pushed the Astros harder a year earlier. Their version of competing every year hasn't lifted the ceiling much. I'd take 2018 and the boom-bust cycle over that. As to Houston's constant competition, their core was built first on a foundation of Process-level tanking, an option that is not only off the table in Boston but would have required canceling at least one world title.
And also not possible anymore because of
I'm neutral on Bloom, there are deals he made that I liked at the time (Vasquez) and others that I hated (Hunter Renfroe and $14 million for a pair of marginal prospects, that sort of give should buy you a guy on a team's top 5 list). But the plan wasn't to use the minor league system to produce franchise players. The plan was to put together a system that consistently produced low cost talent so that they could build around a few top shelf players. Payrolls get unsustainable when you need to sign pricy free agents everywhere. Hence their dumpster diving for roleplayers.
True, if Boston had managed to lose one more game last year they'd be drafting in the top five.
Seems like everyone is drooling over Yamamoto, so that won't be easy, but I'm pretty glad we aren't locked into Carlos Rodon right now. Yamamoto was out until this week, apparently, and threw seven dominant shutout innings in his return. Yes please.
I thought the plan was to remain competitive while building for a sustainable future. Four last place finishes in 5 years is not competitive. Souring the fan base by dumping Mookie and Xander is not what it takes to build a winner in the AL East. He gambled by signing Kluber and letting Wacha and Eovaldi leave. He lost. Because he lost we all have lost another season. Nestor Cortes is right the Yankees-Red Sox series starting tonight does not feel like it means anything at all. If he survives another last place finish he will be very fortunate.
Atlanta arguably is more Astros like than Dodgers of late. They went through a wholesale dismantling from 2014-2017, leading up to the move into their new stadium. As a result they built up their pipeline of prospects and laid a foundation of flexibility so they were able to lock down a bunch of their quality young players.
Right, well no two teams are on the same exact path I suppose. I'd just simply argue that if we are looking back over a certain number of seasons, I don't see too many teams' outcomes I wish we could trade the Sox' for, simply because the last year-plus has been a downer.
Except when it was 2022 and then 2023. You know, the years where we were no longer weighed down by the bad contracts we gave Pedroia, Price, Eovaldi, JD Martinez and so on... We'd take that cash and spend smartly on players like... uh, Trevor Story and, ummmm... Corey Kluber and, ah, ah, ah,... Kike Henandez... And exciting young, cost controlled talent would bubble up from the farm system, like Dalbec, Cordero and Duran!
I agree. I don't see how this franchise is going to be a sustainable (tm) World Series contender starting next season (or the season after) if they don't make some significant acquisitions of current MLB players.
FWIW with Eovaldi, I believe they did in fact offer him 3 years at 17 mil, but it was early on in the process and Eovaldi declined. So the Sox pivoted to Jansen, and later when Eovaldi's camp came back to see if the offer was still on the table, they were told no (gotta get under the tax as some point). He took less money form Texas.
Well, the reason they are in this position in the first place is that they went though a much larger period of time -- from Devers to this year, essentially -- with nobody coming up and doing OK.
A lot of those Red Sox employees who are working under Chaim now were there in 2012,2014 and 2015. Maybe It's not just Chaim and they have to look at their over all system of developing of minor leaguers?
Which gets back to the point I've been making for 18 months now, that this franchise is having a really hard time walking and chewing gum at the same time.
They're having a hard time because building a team thorough spending/free agency is inherently very, very difficult and reliant on guessing right with players who are by design, prone to decline. Keep that 2019 roster in tact and you have the Angels -- some stud players with crap everywhere else.
The real talent swings are with international free agents, who you sign as teenagers, so I don't know how much we could know in five years. [And actually it's been less than four years.] Elly de la Cruz, who is worthy of his own thread on a Sox board, signed in 2018 at age 16 and now looks like the kind of prospect that would make us think highly of our team's farm system. So as a reference point I'm not sure how to judge Bloom's performance starting with winter of 2019-20. I will say that of all our IFAs among the top rated guys on Soxprospects, the best of them is Bleis, a Bloom signee now considered our #2 prospect overall, behind Mayer (another Bloom pick but largely attributable to luck). If our farm system isn't electric, it's as much because the pre-Bloom guys don't look like they are moving the needle, or not as much as who other teams are bringing up.
They offered Wacha something in January when he was holding out for more years, and the Sox moved on before Wacha took less of a deal in February (quite late).
There’s a lot of ways to win. We didn’t win in 2013 with young talent. We didn’t go to the ALCS in 2021 with young talent.
Those may be the marching orders, but they are failing, perhaps epically and irreversibly, at the bolded.
