sk7326

A dart throw based on an elite athletic profile.

This is a little bit unfair. Ownership hired him to build a champion - and they gave him the greenlight to do it. Indeed, Dombrowski's acumen mattered a lot - in that his job was to look at all of the Sox premium prospects and make ex ante calls on all of them. And it turned out, he was mostly right - though Moncada has been a perfectly solid starting IF and Kopech is a very good starter when healthy (which has not been often). And the two prospects he and his team decided were the real deals, he promoted them extremely aggressively. (I think Benintendi and Devers had a combined 3 days at AAA)

(more) Honorable Mentions Fallen: Cam Cannon Leap Candidates

Law deep dive on Sox: https://theathletic.com/4146022/2023/02/07/red-sox-top-20-prospect-farm-system-ranked/ 1. Marcelo Mayer (#11 overall) 2. Ceddane Rafaela (#37 overall) 3. Triston Casas (#40 overall) 4. Miguel Bleis (#72 overall) 5. Bryan Mata, RHP 6. Nick Yorke, 2B 7. Mikey Romero, SS 8. Matt Lugo, SS/3B 9. Brandon Walter, LHP 10. Blaze Jordan, 3B/1B 11. Chris Murphy, LHP 12. Roman Anthony, OF 13. Edinson Paulino, Wherever 14. Brainer Bonaci, SS 15. Wikelman Gonzalez, RHP 16. Gilberto Jimenez, OF 17. Cutter Coffey, SS 18. Nathan Hickey, C 19. Nico Kavadas, 1B 20. Shane Drohan, LHP

The mood swings are 100x more important than the GM here.

It's not. NOW, the firing of Dombrowski was not really justified because he did exactly what the owners wanted him to do. But Bloom has been fine - he is dealing with ownership level issues. Heck, Dombrowski's worst move - the extremely risky at the time extension for Chris Sale - had ownership buy-in. Ownership doesn't blindly delegate spending decisions like THAT.

A lot has to go right in a division there 83 wins might be last place. The bullpen makeover is encouraging - we know bullpen performance is volatile as a thing, but there is a lot of depth. The rotation has a lot of bodies. And I do trust Cora to piece that together more or less. Last year we had a case where the team got jack squat out of key offensive positions. (RF/1B) That should be better Of course, the center of the field is now uncertain. I will say last year, the team's farm guys all had rough seasons. And basic law of averages points to hopefully that not being the case. And yeah, Sale is a huge key - though at this point I am waiting for the next, innvovative way he gets himself injured.

ESPN (Kiley McDaniel) ranks Boston at 14

Ultimately the assessment of the system comes down to how one views the pitchers in it. The team has brought in a lot of pitchers with a fairly wide range of outcomes. Position player-wise the org is in a much better position for sure (4 guys in the top 100 is evidence there). And of course longer term, the goal is for the system to be able to get to where the Dodgers are in consistently being able to make players better, or how Cleveland has been able to spit out one young starting pitcher after another.

I will push back on 3. He is very transparent about the rankings - the folks who do public facing work in this area (as it turns out, most of them are friends and appear on each other's shows) are going to have less information than teams do. They are doing the best they can. He has mentioned often - that he, Longenhagen (Fangraphs), McDaniel (ESPN) or Jim Callis (MLB.com) have different rankings but that none of them are "wrong". They all go and see as many prospects as possible, and the process is sound. The other thing is - when I've heard him on shows, he will just give his opinion when asked without the usual "well, you never know" sort of stuff. He's paid for takes - there you go. And - to be fair - most prospects don't make it, and an honest assessment of any random sample of prospects is likely to be negative. FWIW, here is the blurb for #23 from the Athletic - https://theathletic.com/4138444/2023/02/02/mlb-farm-system-ranking-prospects/ Dodgers, Guardians, Orioles, Diamondbacks, Rays are the Top 5 (given where they have been drafted, the Orioles and D-Backs BETTER be good)

The thing with the Rays is that they have spent a LOT on infrastructure and I am curious whether that has followed in Boston. Like Tampa has one of the league's largest pro scouting groups. Bloom and Dombrowski both were intentional at adding arms and that has been good. But there is a lot of reliever risk with all of them - even the ones we like. Whitlock and Tanner Houck, M.D. both have a lot to prove there (I am more optimistic about Whitlock).

The ranking of the farm system is interesting - and it's driven by the one thing you really can ding Bloom for (and has been a real surprise) - the lack of pitching in the organization. The position players are interesting - 3 or 4 players are in the various Top 100s (4 for Law, 3 for ESPN). I think there has been a concerted effort to add pitchers - but besides Bello, the system has not produced anybody with great starter projection. I am old enough to remember Clay Buchholz coming out of AAA and pitching a no-hitter in 2007. There is no pitcher of that level of repute.

Well the Sox plummeted to the bottom having a 60 game stretch that lots of teams have in normal seasons. The next season they won 90 again. That said, the trade really is more about the Dodgers are the class org of the league - what the Red Sox could/should aspire to and way aren't at the moment.

You don't have to broadcast every specific move - but it's about series of moves reflecting an underlying plan. And that largely hasn't happened. There have been a series of band-aids. In 2021, the bandaids were good enough to come 6 wins from a most unlikely banner, last year those bandaids crapped out. The last decade of Red Sox baseball more than anything else has been a story of ownership's priorities with the ballclub whiplashing pretty violently. Amazingly, they were wire-to-wire the best team in baseball in 2 of those seasons. Baseball historians in 20 years or so are going to be very confused.

I think botching the Bogaerts negotiations was a different deal - just a different level of player. If ownership decided they'd give Devers or Bogaerts a megacontract but not both, obviously Devers is the priority. The tough part of the Bogaerts thing is at least the public perception (Bloom and reporting around him did not help) that the Sox were caught with their pants down. Since we have to take the Sox' tax concerns as a given - there is no point litigating that - I totally get the ambivalence towards a deal like the one the Padres gave him. The club has had trouble articulating a direction - exactly what are we trying to do here? And the moves on their own have not given much indicator either.

It was a failure - but mostly of ownership. As a baseball trade - I have indicated it has not been great, but given the circumstances the process was sound. If there is a complaint about the return at the time of the trade - it was the lack of pitching coming back, considering how horrifyingly bereft of organizational pitching depth there was/is.

This is true about all trades and about life. But evaluating process ex ante is still worth doing - it's the information the teams and fans have when the trade is made. After all, if every one of those players in the Soto trade got hit by a bus, are we going to go "well, time sure ruled on that trade".

Hard to say - it was obviously the best players they got offered. The more important question is when did the Red Sox know the situation was without resolution and what to do about it. The real sliding doors moment with Betts was the 2019 trade deadline. That was when the team could have had some substantial leverage, but it would have involved selling during a season they were in some "low but not THAT low" percentage wildcard contention.

This is a fair take. If I had an issue with the trade it is more with "all the circumstances leading up to that point". That said, is the franchise in better shape from the trade than keeping Betts and then living with compensation? Hard to say in 2023, but ex ante - when the trade was made of course it did. Really the big issue with the trade was that Downs - a top 100 prospect who was expected to have a pretty high floor - was a total washout for the Red Sox. Whether the missed season due to the pandemic was the cause or not - his career splits between the two are truly jarring. Getting two solid starters out of the deal - even with that as the ceiling, would have been a good result for a fire sale.

Indeed - and I certainly would not expect the Soto return. I even acknowledged the difference is circumstances. But again, trading a superstar and getting no All Star potential in return stings and I am totally okay with some resentment of the front office on that front. There is a large range between what the Nationals got for Soto and the meh the Sox got for Betts and wishing for spot in between the two is perfectly reasonable.

1. The team traded a Top 10 player and got no All-Star ceiling out of it. So from a baseball perspective it was a bad trade. Knowing in 2022 that the San Diego Padres traded multiple Top 100 prospects to the Nationals for Juan Soto makes this harder to swallow, even with the extra control that Soto has. 2. That said, if you rejigger the notion of the trade to "The David Price salary dump featuring Mookie Betts", then the baseball trade at the time was okay. Jeter Downs was seen as a high floor prospect (whoopsie) and Verdugo was arguably the Sox' best player in that forsaken 2020 miniseason. 3. Honestly, the big problems the Sox have been more before the FA picture loomed. They and Betts and Bogaerts never got close on extensions. When Betts only had one year of control left, it did take away some of Boston's leverage. From what was reported, there were not a ton of buyers, though again we don't know exactly what ownership was looking for and whatnot. Were there more teams in the position of - say, Minnesota (101-61 in 2019) who might have been willing to trade for Betts knowing they were only getting the 1-year? I don't know. 4. The real Monday Morning Quarterback play is to wonder whether Boston should have dealt Betts at the 2019 trade deadline. I totally get why they didn't and largely support it - there was a wildcard chase after all. However, if the Red Sox really knew the state of play contractually, looked at the jumble of teams they had to fight off to get a wild card spot, and the alarming state of their 2019 pitchihg staff ... it would have taken stones, but that would have been the time to get the sort of bidding war that would have gotten some All-Star sort of ceiling. While I think there were plenty of extenuating circumstances, the top level story of the Betts trade is what it is - and fans have every right to be bummed out about it. The team simply did not get the organizational jolt you'd expect by dealing a player of that caliber.

Kiley McDaniel, ESPN, Top 100 https://www.espn.com/mlb/insider/story/_/id/35490487/top-100-mlb-prospects-list-2023-kiley-mcdaniel 7. Marcelo Mayer 37. Triston Casas 95. Miguel Bleis Ceddane Rafaela is in the just missed list.

Not exactly. He is a fine 2B prospect - but it was when he moved to CF that you started getting those 70-80 defense scout ratings. The thing with his approach is that he seems to track like a Nomar or Vlad - where he is up there to swing, but he is very good at getting the barrel of the bat on pitches. He just needs to work on chasing less. And of course he is tiny - though he clearly is generating good leverage. That said, .278/.330/.500 as a 21 year old in AA plus elite CF defense is a very very encouraging prospect. Absolutely worth being excited.

AFL success is nice - but not worth overthinking. These dudes have played a whole season and are often exhausted.

https://theathletic.com/4132943/2023/01/30/top-100-mlb-prospects-2023-keith-law/ The Athletic rolling out Law's prospect material - from the top 100 11. Marcelo Mayer 37. Ceddane Rafaela 40. Triston Casas 72. Miguel Bleis