Sitting in last place in the American League East with virtually no chance to make the playoffs, the Boston Red Sox fired chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom on Thursday. It was an announcement that surprised the baseball industry, as most assumed that Bloom would get one more year to bring the Red Sox back to the playoffs considering Boston made the ALCS under his management in 2021.
Bloom started his tenure by trading Mookie Betts to the Los Angeles Dodgers, an iconic trade due to Betts' popularity in Boston, how well he's performed in Los Angeles and how poorly the trade has gone for the Red Sox. That transaction is what Bloom will be most remembered for in Boston, but there's a more thorough accounting to be done of this era and who ultimately deserves the blame for a two-year downturn.
What brought Bloom to Boston
Bloom inherited the fallout of a situation that ownership saw as unsustainable just one season removed from Boston's 2018 World Series title. After that 108-win championship team, Boston regressed to 84 wins but still had the top payroll in baseball with a roster full of big-money veterans.
Bloom was hired to continue to compete, but while running lower payrolls and rebuilding a farm system that was one of the consensus bottom-three in baseball at the time. He had a decade of experience as a key exec in Tampa Bay, where the Rays did just what Boston was aspiring to do, with far less money to spend. It seemed like a logical marriage.
The Red Sox now have an average farm system, and the league's 11th-ranked payroll, just below the first threshold of the CBT. So, the rebuilding of the farm system has happened and the payroll was trimmed as expected -- but that hardly tells the story of Bloom's time in Boston.
The Betts trade
It became obvious when Bloom was hired that, regardless of what he thought, ownership didn't want to give Betts a megadeal via a bidding war with his contract set to end after the 2020 season and Betts intent on testing the market. Giving Betts a big deal dictated by the open market or even settling for just a compensatory draft pick when he left after one last hurrah seemed like paths that predecessor David Dombrowski would have taken, and that's not who the Red Sox wanted to be at the time.
The fact that the Dodgers -- arguably the savviest team in baseball and the stated model for many clubs -- decided to give Betts their first nine-figure deal in six full seasons under the most lauded front office in baseball was a hint that Red Sox ownership was missing something with their line of thinking. Nine-figure, long-term deals aren't the problem in a vacuum, but signing a player to one to get a short-term upgrade, or as a reward for past performance, or when you don't know the player as both a person and athlete, or to guarantee huge salaries into a player's 40s, are when they become problematic. None of those were the case with Betts and Boston, but the Red Sox still chose to trade a franchise superstar with one season left on his contract.
As is often the case with these types of trades, the return hasn't been that good. Alex Verdugo has been solid, Connor Wong is now a useful player, Jeter Downs was lost on waivers and the Red Sox dumped some bad money by including David Price in the deal.
The Bogaerts decision
While the Betts deal didn't work out as Boston had hoped, what the Red Sox did with their next superstar free agent saga was genuinely baffling.
Xander Bogaerts was on a similar track to Betts as a perennial All-Star who was revered in Boston -- and had also made it clear he wanted to spend the rest of his career there. Then, after low-balling Bogaerts on a contract extension, the Red Sox turned around and gave the kind of money Bogaerts wanted to Trevor Story -- before Bogaerts had even left.
The Betts-Bogaerts-Story trifecta and the surrounding fallout was what ruined the Bloom era, though who exactly is to blame for the way it played out is hard to say.
The Red Sox learned partially from this experience, giving a nine-figure deal to Rafael Devers, who had just turned 26. But for many in Boston, the deal was too little, too late.
Player development and free agency
Boston's drafts under Bloom have been strong. The three players who received notable bonuses in the shortened 2020 draft are all still solid prospects: Nick Yorke, Blaze Jordan and Shane Drohan. In 2021, draft headliner Marcelo Mayer, who was No. 11 on my most recent prospect rankings update, looked like he'd be a good to very good big leaguer -- which is what you need from the No. 4 overall pick. Its later picks and the system depth created have generally been good as well.
Internationally, under Bloom, the Red Sox signed preseason top-100 prospect Miguel Bleis and developed 2017 class signee Ceddanne Rafaela's breakout, turning him into a top 100 quality prospect. There's also a robust next tier of lower-level sleepers and potential role players.
I wouldn't say player development has been a clear top-10 department, creating real prospects out of nowhere regularly, but overall it has been solid and probably ranks in the middle third of the league under Bloom.
Bloom's record in free agency has been solid, all things considered. From last winter's crop, only Corey Kluber (a $10 million guarantee) has been a failure, despite the industry hating the Masataka Yoshida deal, which now looks fine. The winter before included the Story deal, but then only Hansel Robles and Jake Diekman were failures and only for a combined $10.25 million.
On the positive end of things, Bloom signed Adam Duvall before this season (one year, $7 million, 2.1 WAR to date), Rich Hill before 2022 (one year, $5 million, 1.8 WAR), Enrique Hernandez before 2021 (two years, $14 million, 4.0 WAR in the first year of the deal), traded for Nick Pivetta in 2020 (5.2 WAR over three plus seasons with one more season of control) in exchange for Brandon Workman and Heath Hembree and picked Garrett Whitlock from the Yankees in the Rule 5 Draft before 2021 (3.6 WAR over three seasons, leading to an extension). Bloom also transitioned Brayan Bello, Jarren Duran, Tanner Houck, Kutter Crawford and Triston Casas to regular roles with the big league club.
That's basically been the record on Bloom's free agent signings -- mostly good, with one or two of the smaller gambles flopping while the big-ticket decisions end up coloring the vibes around the whole situation.
So ... who's to blame?
The bottom line is the Red Sox are nearing a second consecutive last-place season and their chief baseball officer is out of a job, so who is at fault for what's gone wrong in Boston?
I'll take a 30,000-foot view on the Bloom tenure and break down how I see it.
The Red Sox wanted to be more financially responsible and sustainable, so they brought in a guy with a great resume from a successful org that consistently did more with less to replace their recently fired chief exec, who won a World Series in Boston but didn't leave things in great condition. They asked him to trade the defining star of this era of their organization as soon as he arrived, when everyone knew he had to make that trade. He was then tasked with building a consistent winner despite being handed one of the worst farm systems in baseball and limited payroll space. He did well -- or at least average, if not a bit above in all respects -- but either by his call or ownership's decision, much of the money saved from losing Betts went to Story, who hasn't been that good, and despite paying Devers, they low-balled Bogaerts and then spent over half of that money on Yoshida, who has been just fine.
From where I stand, the Red Sox ownership asked Bloom to come in and do the nearly impossible -- walk into a not great situation and make it a great one, under pressure, and immediately, in the most competitive division -- and he merely did solidly instead of delivering a miracle.
Look at what the Red Sox asked of Dombrowski before him. He came in as an old-school choice to replace process-oriented executives (Ben Cherington and eventually Mike Hazen) and asked to produce action, results and fireworks. The Red Sox got just that, then decided they craved a pendulum shift -- back to a process-driven approach to rebuilding the underlying talent they had just let go as a strategy.
Running the Red Sox under owner John Henry is a job that demands more -- win titles or pack your bags -- than any other club in baseball. It's a level of expectation you'd only see from an insecure English Premier League club or the most ruthless SEC football program. Even the Yankees -- zero titles in 14 years, but the same general manager the whole time -- will make decisions based more on a consistent plan and process more than the results. That's the prerogative of the owners, as is the payroll, but it can make for a negative long-term association with the club.
There's no doubt Red Sox fans demand results and there is some merit to finding the correct head of baseball ops as soon as you think it's not the one you currently employ. It's become conventional wisdom to blame unsuccessful organizations on their owners, pointing to decades of mismanagement and losing. Just because the Red Sox owner has mixed in World Series titles and heralded successful executives doesn't mean he can't also be part of the problem. In my view, Henry's bar for executive performance and whipsaw strategy shifts for the last decade have become a barrier to sustained success for the Red Sox. Now the question becomes which baseball executive would walk into this situation next?