Getting fired is just part of the business of sports. If you want to work in the industry, you have to make peace with the idea that you could be fired pretty much at any time, and sometimes due to circumstances beyond your control — a key player gets hurt, a promising rebuild doesn’t pan out, your owner is an egomaniac, normal stuff.
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Chaim Bloom’s tenure as president of baseball operations for the Red Sox ended on Thursday after four years, with one playoff appearance, two last-place finishes, and this year’s 73-72 record that has them well behind the three contenders in the AL East. Bloom’s major-league moves have been a mixed bag, but the team’s offense is a strength and they have a very strong group of position-player prospects in the upper minors. If he was fired for on-field reasons, it’s about the pitching, and a lot of why the pitching has been bad goes back to the regime before Bloom took over, and to the Red Sox owners’ sudden conversion to the religion of crying poor.
What went wrong for Boston this year seems fairly easy to diagnose: They have given up too many runs. They sit at 4.88 runs allowed per game on the day of Bloom’s firing, which ranks 12th in the American League, well below the median and the average, and they’re surrounded by non-contenders, behind even the Tigers, who lost two starters to injuries since you started reading this article. Even with Brayan Bello’s breakout, their starters still rank 12th in ERA and 13th in fWAR in the American League, while their relief corps is 10th in ERA but fifth in fWAR because they’ve thrown more innings than any other bullpen except Oakland’s — 596 so far, over four innings per game.
The team came into the year planning to contend, or at least saying they planned to do so, with a rotation that included two guys converting from relief to starting (Kutter Crawford, who has been very good, and Garrett Whitlock, who’s back in relief), two guys whose arms Lloyd’s of London wouldn’t insure at any price (Chris Sale, who started the year on the injured list, and James Paxton, who will end it there), and a pitcher who has never been able to get lefties out (Tanner Houck). They brought Nick Pivetta back on a one-year deal for some depth, but had to demote him to relief in mid-May. Bello and Crawford have been bright spots, but those two guys aren’t a contending rotation, and I don’t think it was reasonable for the Red Sox to think that group of seven starters was going to produce above-average work for them.
How did they get to that point? Bloom’s predecessor, Dave Dombrowski, brought the team a World Championship in 2018, but the process strip-mined a lot of the long-term pitching and saddled the club with some bad contracts. The trade for Chris Sale worked in the short term, but the decision to sign him to a five-year extension in March 2019 has been a fiasco, as he blew out his elbow that same year and has thrown just 135 innings since the extension kicked in for 2020, with one year and $27.5 million still remaining. That same deal also cost the team Michael Kopech, who also had Tommy John after the trade but has pitched more and more effectively than Sale since both returned to the mound in 2021.
Bloom inherited a roster with one healthy, effective starter under contract in 2020, Nate Eovaldi, who actually was pretty bad in 2019 but gave the team 7 WAR over the next three years of his contract before leaving as a free agent. He traded two replacement-level relievers for Nick Pivetta in the pandemic summer, and since the deal has gotten 7 WAR from the right-hander between the rotation and bullpen, perhaps Bloom’s best move by results, although whoever was responsible for nabbing Garrett Whitlock in the 2020 rule 5 draft deserves a big raise. He signed Michael Wacha for a year and $7 million, getting 3+ WAR for it, and signed Martín Perez to a pair of one-year deals, getting two credible seasons of innings.
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These are all great moves on the margins, signing or trading for back-end starter types to flesh out a rotation or provide bulk from the bullpen, but at no point did Bloom — or ownership — go out and get a big free-agent starter, or trade for one, and the farm system hasn’t produced pitching, either, even though it continues to produce position players and will continue to do so. Over the past three years, combined, only three Boston pitchers have generated 3+ rWAR in one season: Eovaldi in 2021 (4.3), Wacha in 2022 (3.3), and Bello this year (3.8 to date). Pivetta is the only other Boston starter in that span to even have a 2-WAR season. The Sox have lacked high-end starters, period, and it’s hard to contend with that kind of run-prevention problem even if you do score a lot of runs.
The farm system has taken a sharp turn for the better this year, with a strong draft this July, a big step forward for last year’s second-round pick Roman Anthony, and some smaller breakouts or returns to form from other position players in the system. However, they didn’t have any pitchers in the system who projected as more than fifth starters in the majors back when I ranked their prospects in February, and that’s still true.
It seems like a clear strategy choice from the top, as they took just one pitcher in the top three rounds with Bloom overseeing baseball ops and didn’t give any pitchers more than $600,000 as bonuses, while in international free agency, they followed the same philosophy, with $450,000 the most they gave any pitcher in the past three classes. Pitchers are riskier as a class, of course, with elbow injury rates at or near all-time highs, but you can’t just send an Iron Mike out there and hope for the best.
That said, several of Bloom’s higher-profile decisions have not worked out. The $105 million commitment to Masataka Yoshida has produced 0.7 fWAR, as he’s been one of the worst defensive outfielders in baseball this year and hasn’t held up his offensive performance after an early-season hitting streak; he’s hit just .251/.281/.396 in the second half and the Red Sox have increasingly been giving him days off, sitting him against lefties like Framber Valdez and Julio Urías. The stories last winter and spring of Boston outbidding other teams by $20 million or more can’t have helped Bloom’s cause.
Letting Xander Bogaerts walk has looked like a smart decision so far with Bogaerts having his worst year since 2017, but the signing of Trevor Story has been a disaster as well between injuries and poor performances at the plate, and he’s under contract for four more years. It’s fair to say that ownership probably shackled Bloom’s ability to go out and improve the team’s pitching while also saying that his biggest free-agent moves have not worked out. (The Mookie Betts deal is its own animal, and I think Bloom had to take a huge discount on the return because everyone knew he had to deal Betts.)
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But that’s it for big free agents, which contradicts the way that John Henry & Co. have run the Red Sox since they first acquired the team twenty years ago. There are only two players on Boston’s roster this year who were signed as free agents to deals over two years, Yoshida and Story. They haven’t swum in the deep end of the free agent pool since Bloom got the job, and have been more keen to shed salary — trading Mookie Betts rather than signing him to an extension, which I would have to say has not worked out in Boston’s favor — than to maintain a payroll commensurate with their revenues or their own spending history. Blaming Bloom or O’Halloran for this very well-off ownership group’s sudden asceticism seems to miss the point. This Red Sox team could have been a lot better if they’d just gone out and spent some money on some pitching.
Where they go from here will tell us a lot about ownership’s commitment to winning. They could stay internal with a candidate like vice president of scouting Mike Rikard, who was scouting director when the team drafted Triston Casas, Jarren Duran, Kutter Crawford, Andrew Benintendi and Tanner Houck; or executive vice president/assistant general manager Eddie Romero, who was the team’s international director when they signed or agreed to sign Rafael Devers, Yoan Moncada, Bryan Mata, Ceddanne Rafaela and Brayan Bello. Both are long-time Red Sox executives with strong track records in evaluation and in leadership, each overseeing a substantial department for several years during their tenures.
They could look to someone like James Click, who was once Bloom’s colleague in Tampa, but who in the interim was the GM of the Astros and led them to a World Series win just a year ago. Or they could try to recycle a famous name to get headlines and win the offseason, so to speak, which might work out if it also meant loosening the purse strings so they can go get some starting pitching, but would also imply to me that they’re less serious about long-term contention, which is where this team sat for the Theo Epstein era and quite a few years beyond.
They’re the Boston Bleeping Red Sox, and it’s time they start acting like it again.
(Photo: Billie Weiss / Boston Red Sox / Getty Images)
