I’m familiar with Gonzalez and Perales. I think there are a lot of lower ranked pitchers that maybe at low A at the most that I think the question was asking- draft lots of IFA’s and things will sort out rather than targeting high college types. I don’t really know though.
The Orioles tanked for 5 whole seasons before finally finishing above 0.500, but still missing the playoffs, in 2022. Fans here wanted Bloom fired after the Sox finished last in 2022, one season after making the ALCS. Henry & Co have made it clear they have zero intention of fully tanking 5 seasons.
The Red Sox certainly seemed to employ a quantity-over-quality approach to IFA pitching during Bloom’s tenure.
I’ve posted about this multiple times but this isn’t a Red Sox thing it’s an industry thing. Most of these guys were drafted and signed before 2020 and have emerged as useful in their mid 20s. The league as a whole has shrunk the amount of resources spent on drafting pitchers early significantly. The number of pitchers taken in the first round of the draft has dropped every year since 2019 and if you look at the top 100 pitching prospects, there are just as many pitchers taken after the first round as picked in the top round.
I'm with you on most of the rest, but this is a different Logan Allen.
This is a very nice summary, and thank you for putting it together. Do you happen to know the numbers during Dombrowsk’s time? I may well be wrong, but I thought this switch in approach preceded Bloom’s tenure.
Great post. I think it’s important for us to recognize that a lot of what the Sox were doing actually reflected industry-wide trends. In fairness to @ehaz and others, it‘s probably reasonable to wonder whether *because* other teams were operating in a similar manner there might have been some market-inefficiency opportunities there for the Sox to invest big in pitching prospects. I’m skeptical of that, but I think it would be an interesting argument. The point, though, is that it’s just not accurate to portray the Sox’s recent approach to the acquisition of pitching prospects as some kind of outlier. It fell squarely within the broader trend in the game. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Breslow ended up operating in a similar fashion.
The representation of pitchers in the 2017 IFA class (more than 55% of players but just 7% of bonuses) was very similar to 2022 (almost 52% but less than 6%). In general, though, pitchers in the IFA classes prior to Bloom represented a smaller share of players and a larger share of bonuses.
I remember reading somewhere in the last year or so that Dombrowski was extremely hands-off on IFA scouting, at least while he was here. I can try to find it.
Thanks.
This is really outstanding and very helpful! I really appreciate you pulling it together. I think it effectively demonstrates that there was a clear shift during Bloom's tenure.
Interestingly the Cubs have bucked this trend in recent years. In 2023, they went ~$300k over slot ($1.4M) to sign their 2nd rounder Jaxon Wiggins and 4th rounder Will Sanders. In 2022, they took Cade Horton in the 1st at #7 overall, signed him to an under slot deal ($4.45M), and used the savings to sign two high school pitchers to over slot deals. 2nd rounder Jackson Ferris got $1.4m over slot ($3M) and 4th rounder Nazier Mule got $500k over slot ($1M).
Liu suddenly started striking guys out in AA this past season. Walk rates are still insane but he might come back into relevance if something has suddenly clicked.
This is an excellent point. Perhaps it's too early to predict whether Breslow will chart a different course when it comes to investing in pitching prospects.
The situation was somewhat unique, but the Sox won the Dice K sweepstakes in 2006 over the Yankees and other teams in play. And they did it with big $$. One article I found: https://www.recordonline.com/story/sports/mlb/2006/11/10/were-yankees-outbid-for-matsuzaka/53019511007/
The Red Sox just need them to bring back the blind bid system and they're golden again.
If you're going to post that here, tell us your reasoning. I'm not picking on you, but if we don't let our new members know what we expect when they post, we do the entire board a disservice. I'm not even sure you're wrong, but here it's incumbent on you to back up your assertion a little bit.
He's done nothing but expand his sports holdings over the last 20 years, I don't see why he would reverse that course now. If you want to point to his Liverpool purchase as saying he wants to get out of baseball, that was 13 years ago and it doesn't look like he needed to sell one team to make the other competitive, both have won championships in that time. He just expanded again by buying the Penguins for almost a billion dollars. That doesn't sound like someone who needs cash, is tired of being involved in sports, or who can't keep an interest in more than one team at once. He is pretty close to an ideal owner, unless you are the type who wants their team to be owned by a sportswashing dictator who doesn't care about the money they spend if it makes them look better.
Being an efficient spender makes a lot of sense in a league (NHL) with a salary cap. And while it's a decent hockey market, it's never going to be the #1 team in the city, and therefore maybe less fan and media pressure?
The Penguins (and NHL teams in general) have a lot of certainty to them. They have a salary cap, but the NHL national TV deal kind of sucks, and their is little to no international money from what I understand. Local ticket revenue and owning the local sports network (which he does) are the big money generators, but even the MLB teams have seen local rights money be an issue for regional sports networks in smaller markets. The Penguins are decent investment, but are worth a fifth of what the Sox are for a good reason. The Sox have a decent amount of cost certainty due to the salary tax levels, which no teams exceed for an extended period, and good high money income guarantees from national licensing. It's not NFL level good, but it's the next best thing. Why would he dump the Sox because it is stressful, and keep Liverpool? That team has no cost or income certainty due to the vagaries of European competition qualification and the uneven split of TV revenue in the Premier League, combined with a fan base which is predisposed to despise him because he wasn't born and raised in their own neighborhood? That shit is way more stressful. The Nascar teams are a declining investment that most likely peaked around the time he bought them, but does just fine. Their golf investment is relatively minor at this time, so I don't see how that affects anything else. He's a businessman with deep pockets, and his only business at this time is sports. Why would he sell his best asset? The RE development is just another reason why the Sox and Fenway are so great to own. He's going to have a much harder time building like that around Anfield. Have you seen the neighborhoods around European stadiums? It's Anfield, and then the next block is just average people's row houses. There is no land to develop, there is barely enough to have a team store or museum next to your stadium.
