Bloom never really wanted to invest any amount in pitching (big deals were position players, highest pitcher drafted was #99 in his four drafts, didnt pay any big bonuses to pitchers in IFA). I think analytically you probably do get a better return on position players, but at some point you need to invest something in pitching or you're left with a staff thats made up of what the Sox have: a collection of guys who are a combination of not very good, constantly hurt, or guys who are 3-4 inning guys. How heavily he went on position players really was remarkable.
The Red Sox have fired Chaim Bloom
- Thread starter Smiling Joe Hesketh
- Start date
But isn’t it Bloom’s job to know who would replace that production? We’re just whatever prognosticators, but he’s getting paid to identify talent. He failed at that in this situation.
Would it be less of a problem if the 2 best pitchers disappeared & then the best prospects are in AA or AAA?
It's amazing how much people enjoy being unhappy.
Agreed. Pitching is volatile so I get why he’s trying to lock in the position players, and he’ll almost certainly have some “wins from that group”, but that approach has led to a situation where there isn’t much above A+ ball. It’s certainly a very tough job. And it’s not like he’s been alone in this organization. Hopefully Bello and guys like Wikelman and Yordanny can buck this trend. We need to start developing our own pitching talent.
No. I understand the point.The point is just stupid. They aren't "topping out". They're 20. The fact that y'all don't have any patience doesn't change the fact that the farm system is in a really good place.
I've stated on numerous occasions that I don't think Bloom is special & I'm fine with him being fired.
Because the Red Sox haven’t used their elite draft capital on pitching.
Exactly. Dombrowksi was fired after four years because the farm system was in shambles- yet four years isn’t long enough to evaluate Bloom on pitchers he acquired as amateurs….seems inconsistent.
Am I misunderstanding something here? How could Duran with no arm and other defensive issues be considered a candidate for RF, especially RF in Fenway, in place of Renfroe?
Going into the 2022 off-season, I thought Kevin Gausman was the perfect fit for the Sox. He’s a workhorse veteran pitcher that seemed to be hitting his peak, with his early years molded in the AL East.
Instead Bloom ended up giving pretty much the same contract to Trevor Story, a guy with a ticking time bomb of an elbow playing out of position, and Rich Hill.
Real life isn’t a video game and sometimes the guy just picks a different team. But Gausman was the guy and he whiffed.
I don’t have all the drafts in front of me but my recollection is that most of the high picks have been hitters.
He wasn’t, it’s just a way to excuse a crappy trade- they gambled that JBJ still had something left in the tank (playing up the necessity of having a CF in RF at Fenway), and he didn’t. Don’t think it’s more complicated than that.
This is what I don’t understand. Mayer ain’t coming next year. What’s the return? These are all DD guys. If the argument is that we need to wait until 2026, then everyone has lost it.
Right. The farm system was in shambles when DD left, but now things look really good- in large part because of Bello, Casas, Duran, Houck, Crawford, Rafaela, Perales….all guys who were part of that last ranked farm system four years ago.
While I have wanted to believe that the firing was the culmination of much careful deliberation, my initial reaction was that this decision was reactionary to improbable expectations. As the Bloom’s Best Acquisition thread shows, he made a number of very good moves. Of course he has a couple of stinkers (and many of us were fine with the Story deal at the time), though even the excellent GMs all have had their share. Building a farm system and having it bear fruit takes years, and there was no 2020 minor league system (and a truncated draft).
However, emerging reports point to a pattern of indecisiveness, of failing to pull the trigger on deals that, at least in retrospect, would have helped the team (but not immediately…and Kennedy was complaining about not making the postseason).
Hopefully Henry et al are still on board with Bloom’s vision, but decided he doesn’t quite have the executive chops to pull off key deals.
What they should do about Cora and the coaching staff…perhaps that should be in another thread.
However, emerging reports point to a pattern of indecisiveness, of failing to pull the trigger on deals that, at least in retrospect, would have helped the team (but not immediately…and Kennedy was complaining about not making the postseason).
Hopefully Henry et al are still on board with Bloom’s vision, but decided he doesn’t quite have the executive chops to pull off key deals.
What they should do about Cora and the coaching staff…perhaps that should be in another thread.
I thought the running theory was that Renfroe was traded to clear the deck for Seiya Suzuki. Even that seemed like a stretch. I recall that everyone thought that Cora was bluffing when he said that JBJ was going to be the RF, but he wasn’t.
It was either a miscalculation of the FA market or a poor evaluation of JBJ’s talent level. He made the major league team actively worse for the cost of JBJ’s contract and some very middling prospects.
This was supposed to be the Bloom TB special. Trade me Sale for those guys and then resign Sale for pennies years later. That type of deal never happened. It sucks, but the Rays pulled it off. That’s what you get paid to do.
Almost nobody from the farm system helped the team for multiple years after DD left...
I expect lots of people Bloom has acquired to help the team after he leaves. Most of the people Bloom has drafted are proceeding about how one would expect based on the draft capital used or better, & there are lots of interesting IFAs who obviously can't possibly be ready to help in this time frame.
But again... I've never said Bloom shouldn't have been fired. But actual experts think we have a top 5 system, including intriguing pitching prospects. So the criticisms of people who don't even pay attention to our farm system don't really hold a lot of weight for me.
They have been but that’s kind of the point. You need a strike a balance between hitting and pitching and Chaim really didn’t in the draft. There are other avenues like international signings to compensate for it but feels like the early returns are light on pitching after 4 years.
They drafted multiple top 100 hitting prospects, & a lot of interesting, but less elite pitching prospects.
In my first post on the topic, the plan as I see it would have been to play Duran in LF or CF and Kiké or Verdugo in RF. Totally agree that Duran is not a RF.
Okay then where would Duran, a then 26-year-old prospect, have gotten PAs in 2022 after putting up a .925 OPS in April/May? Had everyone on the major league roster stayed healthy, that is.
Only 2 of those guys count toward the prospect rankings, & the biggest issue with the farm system under DD was the development process. It did not appear to be modern.
Absolutely this. Weren't we just saying that Bello is the first SP they've produced since Buchholz? I get that the buck stops with whoever the PBOS is, but at some point someone might need to look at their scouting and player development departments, some of those people have been around since the Theo days.
It’s not about patience. It’s more about pitching and understanding your organization’s weaknesses. The most costly position when it comes to free agency and trading is pitching. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to develop pitching from within the organization rather than go out and find pitching elsewhere? There you’re always paying a premium whether it’s money or prospects.
You can find hitters anywhere but developing low cast pitching talent, especially for a team like the Red Sox who have had a tough time developing pitchers, should have been paramount. Through four drafts it was ignored. And I’m not sure why.
It's pretty clear that Bloom didn't spend his high numbered draft picks on pitching. That may or may not have been a good strategy, but it's consistent enough that it appears to be a strategy.
Instead, Bloom acquired younger cost-controlled pitchers by means other than the draft.
He inherited Houck and Murphy, took Whitlock via Rule 5, traded for Winckowski, Seabold, Pivetta, etc., signed Bernardino, and pulled Schreiber off the wire.
It sounds like you think Bloom needed to wipe out all of DD's guys and only go with his own draftees. It does not really work that way. Bloom held onto the better prospects in the system (DD picks mostly), then he added more, by both draft and trade (e.g., Abreu and Winckowski). Generally speaking, you should expect the more seasoned prospects in the system to have been coming up in 2020-now, which is what has actually been happening. The point is to have a stockpile of younger talent at different stages of development.
Specifically Bloom took Yorke and Jordan in 2020 - both HS talents that weren't expected to hop into the majors at their current ages of 21 and 20. But both look like good picks.
He took another HS talent in 2021 with Mayer. Who is 20 years old.
In 2022, the top three picks were HS talent: Romero, Coffee, Anthony.
When exactly should we expect these guys up?
But since 2020, Bloom has brought up a lot of guys who were either in the farm or acquired by trade for the farm.
It definitely seems like an organizational philosophy to focus on up the middle players in the draft. And given that most of the pitchers in the prospect rankings are international, it’s fair to guess that they think (thought) that’s the correct approach.
It depends on how they continue to develop. Drohan is the furthest along & was pitching great in AA, but has pretty much sucked since being promoted to AAA. We'll see if he can develop some more mph in the off season. Van Belle is also in AAA but probably doesn't have the stuff to ever be more than like a 9th starter.
Dobbins & Coffey are both pretty interesting in AA. & Wikelman, but he's a DD guy, too.
The more interesting closer pitchers from the drafts are mostly potential high leverage relievers like Luis Guerrero who was recently promoted to AAA, & Chris Troye/Alex Hoppe in AA.
It's absolutely true the org has focused much more draft capital & IFA money on hitters, but their hit rate on those has been great with guys like Mayer, Anthony, Bleis, Cespedes, Teel & Yorke.
They've gone for more of a quantity approach with the pitchers. It's why I've advocated for free agent starters because they have a lot of cost controlled talent coming in everywhere else, so the budget should be there, & pitching is further away or less elite.
It doesn't, but when I say they have a top 5 farm system, it doesn't even include all the guys they've recently graduated. It puts the whole org in a better place.
I suggest you spend a LOT more time looking at the pitching that just reached Portland and Greenville.
They went over the cap, without having RF insurance. . .so I think that's most likely a JBJ misevaluation.
I mean, I like the concept of taking an older player who is probably due to rebound and some prospects, but the particulars of this one were just bad, bad, and meh. (Although Hamilton and Binelas aren't quite dead yet.)
The SoxProspects podcast discussed this a couple of weeks ago: Under Bloom, the Sox front office seems to have determined that in the U.S. draft, the stakes (and costs) are too high to go all in on a pitcher who may or may not pan out. So the Red Sox have looked instead for pitchers in the international draft. Those players are cheaper; they're also much younger. You're drafting them at 16 or 17 years old, and that's why they're generally not in the majors four years later.
I am not sure I understand your point and if I do understand your point, that you literally have to save ABs for prospects at the level of Duran, I’m extremely happy you’re nowhere near the Front Office because that’s how you get fired
Yup. I think the overall value of those drafts will remain quite good but it’s skewed on one side. I honestly have no idea how GMs get any sleep. The constant juggling of needs/resources has to be exhausting, especially in a pressure cooker like Boston. Here’s to hoping that our impression of Chaim becomes more favorable over time. Definitely possible.
I don’t think it’s @JM3. The people you should be questioning are @BringBackMo and @chawson…who seem to be fighting tooth and nail that Bloom was actually great and we are all missing something
For starters Gonzalez should be knocking on the door next summer, Monegro and Perales ‘25 or mid ‘26.For late inning relievers Guerrero should be up next year, Troye by ‘25. The thing to keep in mind is that pitchers can move through the ranks aggressively with the minors the way they are now, Bello started 2021 in High A and was in Boston by July 2022.
From Fangraphs:
"Imagine trading Mookie Betts. Chaim Bloom must have done that, must have considered all of the angles and potential outcomes of such a move, including the possibility that he would be saddled with it as his legacy — then sold principal owner John Henry on a vision of the Red Sox without the superstar right fielder in order to be hired as the team’s chief baseball officer in October 2019."
They've got this entirely backwards. The ownership didn't want to move forward with Dombrowski's high-spending ways, so they fired him. They then went out and hand-picked a guy who would rebuild the team through the farm system (and Bloom was an ideal fit). How on earth Fangraphs got the impression that it was the other way around is beyond me. The story they tell is absolutely ludicrous.
"Imagine trading Mookie Betts. Chaim Bloom must have done that, must have considered all of the angles and potential outcomes of such a move, including the possibility that he would be saddled with it as his legacy — then sold principal owner John Henry on a vision of the Red Sox without the superstar right fielder in order to be hired as the team’s chief baseball officer in October 2019."
They've got this entirely backwards. The ownership didn't want to move forward with Dombrowski's high-spending ways, so they fired him. They then went out and hand-picked a guy who would rebuild the team through the farm system (and Bloom was an ideal fit). How on earth Fangraphs got the impression that it was the other way around is beyond me. The story they tell is absolutely ludicrous.
You do not read things. There is no point in saying things for the 800th time.
You’re probably right. Whatever. It ultimately doesn’t matter. It’s just a bunch of Sox fans talking about things we have no real idea about on a Saturday night.
What? You’re misreading what they’re saying….
If Henry mandated Betts to get traded, then whoever they hired had to sell Henry on a vision without Betts…which is exactly what FanGraphs is saying. You’re trying too hard to be aggrieved on Blooms behald
