Boston Red Sox terrible, horrible, no good, very bad offseason

Team Building:

During the slog that was the 2019 season, we kept waiting for then-President of Baseball Operations Dave Dombrowski to make some moves that would improve the team’s woeful pitching (as well as the gaping hole at second base) and give them the shot in the arm they needed to get back into contention. However, as the July trade deadline came and passed, all we got for our troubles was the underwhelming Andrew Cashner and a third place finish.

As fans waited for something, anything to happen in the lead up to the trade deadline, Dave Dombrowski was non-committal and evasive as to whether the team would make a move and add another impact player or two while a few weeks prior, owner John Henry stated matter-of-factly that he wasn’t looking to add any payroll.

That message was solidified further by the end of the season when Henry stated that the team needed to reset the tax penalties by getting under the $208 million threshold and that they had known this “for more than a year.”

It seemed as though the Sox went all-in on this by hiring Chaim Bloom who spent years in Tampa Bay working for a team that continually had to do more with less. Bloom mostly sat out the Hot Stove season, opting instead for low-risk, low-reward moves by signing or trading for players like Martin Perez, Jose Perraza, Kevin Plawecki, Trevor Hildenberger, and Austin Brice while letting free agents RIck Porcello and Brock Holt walk away.

In terms of players already on the roster, the team avoided salary arbitration with Mookie Betts ($27 million) and Jackie Bradley ($11 million) while failing to come to agreements with Andrew Benintendi and Eduardo Rodriguez.

The trade rumors surrounding Mookie, Bradley, and David Price continue to swirl, so far they’ve come to nothing.

While nobody really expected Bloom to go all out on the higher-priced free agents this offseason, I’m sure most of us also didn’t expect him to do so little to improve the team’s real areas of need. In a move that seems to sum up Bloom’s offseason thus far, there was mutual interest between the team and reliever Steve Cishek, but the team didn’t want to pay him the $6 million he eventually got from the White Sox.

As of the time of writing, the Red Sox haven’t really done much to bolster their lineup beyond the aforementioned low risk signings, but they also haven’t done much of the payroll slashing they proclaimed they were dedicating this offseason to. In fact, as of right now the team sits at $234.6 million in commitments, not even $10 million less than where they ended last season and a far cry from the $208 million threshold they said they wanted to get under. All of that leads to…

Mixed Messages:

As someone who has worked for both small privately owned companies as well as large global corporations, one thing I’ve learned in my career is that inconsistent leadership and mixed messages are death for morale and productivity. It seemed as though the Red Sox had a unified message heading into the offseason with John Henry and the soon-to-be-fired Dave Dombrowksi preaching fiscal restraint and the goal of resetting the tax penalty. The hiring of small-market Chaim Bloom and the numerous minor moves he’s made thus far seemed to corroborate that.

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Imagine the surprise, then, when John Henry went on a bit of a snit (in the newspaper he owns, no less!) by saying that the whole payroll-cutting approach was just “media driven” nonsense and that the plan was always to keep spending and remain competitive. Not only would this seem to be a complete and outright lie given his previous comments mere months before, but it’s a terrible look. He berated the columnist from his own paper who reached out to him (although given that it was Dan Shaughnessy, I’m sure everyone reading sided with Henry on that one) and completely contradicted everything he and the rest of the front office have been saying since last summer.

Beyond making Henry look completely foolish, the worst part of this is that it strips the team (and Bloom, who had nothing to do with Henry’s comments) of their credibility at a time when public perception of the team is at its lowest since the end of the 2011 season (and we all know how incredibly PR-conscious this ownership group has been). As I and others have said for weeks now, it makes the team look directionless and flailing, which as we’re now seeing is exactly what they are. That would seem to be the least of the Red Sox worries at this point, though.

Cheating and sign-stealing:

The biggest scandal in a long time to rock the baseball world was brought to the forefront again when Major League Baseball dropped the hammer on the Houston Astros for their sign-stealing scheme in 2017 and 2018. Manager AJ Hinch and GM Jeff Luhnow were both suspended for a year (and subsequently fired by owner Jim Crane), the team was fined $5 million and they lost their first- and second-round draft picks in 2020 and 2021.

Most damning of all for the Red Sox, Alex Cora was named as the “ringleader” in the league’s report. Combined with the revelation a couple of weeks ago that the Red Sox improperly used the replay room to steal signals in the 2018 regular season, it was a bad look.

Whether the Red Sox part in the Houston Astros’ sign-stealing scandal has been blown out of proportion or not, it doesn’t matter anymore because in modern-day sports, perception is reality. Once Major League Baseball finishes looking into the Red Sox and Cora’s involvement, this will be the second time the Red Sox will have been disciplined (remember the Apple Watch incident in 2017 under John Farrell?) and so to many baseball fans, they are cheaters. While the Astros acted decisively in firing their bad actors, it seemed as though the Red Sox were going to let Cora twist in the wind until the league finished their investigation.

The majority of the fanbase (myself included) called for the team to fire Cora immediately since he’d already tainted the team with what he did in Houston and the remnants he brought over to Boston. The team finally decided they wouldn’t wait for MLB’s findings and “mutually agreed to part ways with” Cora on Wednesday evening (translation: he was fired). Cora looks like he’s facing a lengthy suspension if not an outright lifetime ban and while the Red Sox did the right thing in firing him, they’re still waiting on the league’s findings and whatever punishment is doled out to them.

Beyond that, now the Red Sox face the specter of starting spring training in one month without a manager. Common sense would seem to dictate that they should just promote bench coach Ron Roenicke to interim manager, ride out the 2020 season, and then clean house and let Bloom pick his own manager in 2021 (this is my preferred course of action). Of course, this is assuming that Roenicke and the rest of Cora’s coaching staff weren’t involved in the cheating scandal.

Whether they decide to promote from within or try and scramble to find someone external, the clubhouse has the potential to be thrown into flux going into a season that already looked like it was going to be a struggle. This is what they call in layman’s terms “a disaster.”

Other Odds and Ends:

There are other smaller but no less damaging hits in public perception the team has taken this offseason. They’ve raised ticket prices yet again after proclaiming their own cost-cutting while apparently not thinking fans might want to do the same (especially after a lousy season and a forthcoming one that doesn’t look much better).

An employee of theirs was convicted of twenty-six counts of sexual assault at the New Hampshire State children’s detention home (to their credit, the team promptly suspended him).  It’s been one thing after another for this team in what’s been their worst offseason in a long time, if not ever.

The obvious comparison to be made here is the 2011 offseason which started with the “fried chicken and beer” scandal and the historic September collapse and ended with the Red Sox out of the postseason. The fallout from that was enormous: Terry Francona was fired and smeared by Henry’s Globe on the way out, GM Theo Epstein resigned, and the entire team (especially Jon Lester, Josh Beckett, and John Lackey) were humiliated. The team tried to make things better (unbelievably) by hiring Bobby Valentine to manage the team in 2012…we all know how that turned out and I don’t need to rehash that low point in Red Sox history.

I’d argue that this offseason has been far worse than 2011. Not only does the team seem utterly directionless from ownership and the front office on down, but the talent on the roster has remained stagnant while the Yankees, Twins, Indians, and White Sox (not to mention the still-dangerous Astros and Athletics) have all improved. The team is involved in a cheating scandal which cost them their disgraced manager, there is major uncertainty with their best player, and various other slings and arrows which have all added up to bloody and batter the Red Sox as a brand and as a team.

If the 2020 season is even remotely similar to 2019 on the field, things will get even uglier in a hurry. Regardless, the Red Sox will have no one to blame but themselves as these problems have been almost entirely self-inflicted. This team turned in a season for the ages two years ago and that’s never felt as far away as it does right now.