Chaim probably had a say in the top few rounds and the overall direction of the draft. The CBO is the one setting the tone. The scouts and others are grading the players.Originally Posted by A Red Sox fan named Hugh
Chaim probably had a say in the top few rounds and the overall direction of the draft. The CBO is the one setting the tone. The scouts and others are grading the players.
I'm happy we draft SSs not pitchers.
I just wish we'd trade some for pitchers we know more about, later on.
When you say it's gonna happen now
When exactly do you mean?
I'm sure they come to a consensus on the overall philosophy on drafting and positional risks vs rewards factors is part of the conversation.
When you say it's gonna happen now
When exactly do you mean?
Yeah, I guess it's smart to draft piles of SS's.
But can we really say the Sox have been great drafters over the long run? And obviously, our inability to draft and develop pitchers is like a hallmark of the franchise.
Championships since purchase by John Henry group: Red Sox 4 Yankees 1
The Red Sox are 8-1 in their last 9 postseason games against the Yankees.
Exactly, which means the vast majority of short stops getting drafted are guys he probably never even heard of.
This may be wrong, because maybe Bloom actually invested more time on the farm than in the big city.
We don't know how much time and resources he devoted to scouting and developing prospects... but we do know that overall, Bloom was a terrible judge of big league "talent" -- based on what he added to the roster (including acceptable players forced into unacceptable roles), and what he passed on or let walk.
And saying he wasn't allowed to spend is an excuse, considering big money was spent on positional free agents with (so far) mediocre results.
So -- giving him the benefit of the doubt -- he was either too busy with the future, or just sucked at the present. Glad that's in the past (maybe... we'll see).
Bloom's issue was that he gave every MLB player a preset value and wouldn't budget on that value when handing out contracts. That's why we wound up with a lot of mediocre FA guys. The FA market went up and he wasn't willing to pay those prices. He wasn't willing to improve the MLB team at the trade deadline because he was never willing to "lose" on a trade because of his preassigned values he had on players. He was more apt to sit back and stay with what he already had as the market passed him by.
https://twitter.com/SotoC803/status/1707611475299188787
Sox have a 11% chance to get a #6 pick or higher.
The question, as it pertains to 2023, is whether ownership had the budget clamps on him so tight that he had little choice but to stay cheap.
Championships since purchase by John Henry group: Red Sox 4 Yankees 1
The Red Sox are 8-1 in their last 9 postseason games against the Yankees.
Even if he had to "stay cheap" he should have allocated his resources in a different manner. It was just poor spending to ignore the SP the way he did. Anyway, this is the Prospects thread in the Minors forum...
He invested in the farm, he didn’t invest more time into scouting guys personally. The Sox, under his guidance increased how much money they spend on trainer, player development, and increased the number of scouts nation wide.
Like MVP said, he likely knew the guy at the top, as is with most GMs/CBOs, I doubt he has anything to do with 17-19 of the 20 guys drafted.
Honestly, this is the way I like it. Sometimes your job at the top isn’t to be an expert at something but to put the right guys in the right places.
As horrible a job Bloom did at the big league level, many of the changes and additions he made at the lower level may pay dividends for years to come.
Bloom did spend a lot of money, last winter. He also had a lot of talent to replace, even though some of that talent had been in some sort of decline for a year or more.
He did offer Nate a pretty big contract, which was later withdrawn.
He did offer Eflin a pretty big sum of money and more years than he ended up giving Kluber.
I do think the budget restrictions did hamper his overall spending, but I think where he spent it seemed to be up to him, and he apparently did want to boost the rotation, earlier in the signing period. Once he missed out on plan A and plan B, it seems plan C did not involved nearly as much spending on the rotation. More was shifted to hitting and the pen.
Maybe he viewed Kluber as a near equal as Nate or Eflin, and maybe that looks like a bigger mistake now than it did then, in hindsight, but the fact is he seemed willing to spend a lot on the rotation, then did not.
There didn't seem to be any effort to bring Wacha back, and I don't recall many othe rumors on major SP'er signings. I seem to recall Seth Lugo's name and maybe one or two others, but nobody that made me think, "Wow!"
Another factor, I'd like to know about is whether there was a directive on not trading higher level prospects for shorter term gains, or was that mostly a Bloom choice.
When you say it's gonna happen now
When exactly do you mean?
Great points.
That investment made in the farm may or will take time to start seeing tangible results at the big league level.
To me, I have already seen enough to think improvements have been made and results have already started to be seen, including more pitching help from our own farm than we have seen in a long time. While several of the contributing players were not "Bloom kids," he did not trade them, some of "his guys" might have been involved in some of the "development" aspect of their rise or success at the big league level. He added several prospects and younger players outside of the draft and IFA, including Abreu, Whitlock, Wink, Wong, Schreiber and others not yet at the MLB level. He hardly traded any prospects, of note, over 4 years.
Recent prospect pitching graduates (not all Bloom kids
Bello
Crawford
Whitlock
Houck
Winckowski
Bernardino, Kelly, Murphy & Robertson
One can easily argue there doesn't seem to be many top pitching prospects on the farm, right now, and I would agree, but the above list is still encouraging, when compared to the list of homegrown pitchers we've seen between Lester and Houck.
My list of the best pitchers on the farm (with SP's projected starting level in '24
Wikelman AA
Perales A+
Gambrell AAA
Monegro A+
Drohan, Walter AAA, Hagenman AAA, Mata
Dobbins AA, E R-C A+, Bastardo AA, Rogers A+, ICoffey AA, Penrod AA, Song AA, Paez A+
RP: Kelly, Guerrero, Liu, Hoppe, Troye, Denlinger, Fernandez, Broadway, Webb, Bell
We may lack on blue chippers, but there are a lot of pitchers with promise and hopes.
The everyday player list is deeper and of higher quality.
When you say it's gonna happen now
When exactly do you mean?
We sat here the past four winters typing about which positions needed to be filled or upgraded, which free agents the Sox should pursue, and which guys they could add to the roster to make the team better. We even offered plenty of reasonable trades that were accepted on Baseball Trade Values (which no interns posing as posters relayed to their Chief).
But every offseason, Bloom pivoted to Plan C pitchers... almost as if his Plan A was to only ink Plan Cs. Now he pivots to Plan Couch.
To add injury to insult, Hang’em Chaim assembled some of the worst defensive teams ever. Our infield was leakier than the titanic (post iceberg) bad pitching, terrible defense and good hitting do not win many championships
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