Trader Theo and the Redemption Plan

I see two basic directions that this offseason could take for the Red Sox.  You can basically bring back everyone, trusting in the team’s third-order winning percentage and boosting them with better depth and perhaps new coaching and training staffs.  If you don’t want this same basic club back, but you do want to compete for the AL East next year, that will require major, blockbuster trades.

The Redemption Plan is pretty simple.  You give these players a chance to redeem themselves.  The core MVP candidates are great players.  Complementary pieces like Salty and Scutaro and Reddick should remain useful.  Carl Crawford still projects as a good player.  The front of the rotation and the set-up and closing core should be major assets again, and the offseason could be focused on acquiring the depth arms needed to support them and head off another September swoon.  You find some improved pitching depth, you re-sign Papelbon and Papi as affordably as possible, and you head into 2012 with a club whose underlying stats – hits and walks and Ks and homers – projected them to win 99 games this year, not 90.  Even with some regression to the mean, that’s a playoff club, and with a little bit of luck and some smart new additions to the rotation, there would be a good case for favoring them over the Yankees. 

And what a story it’d be, right?  These same players that accomplished one of the greatest choke jobs in the history of baseball, coming back again and winning the division, the pennant, maybe the series?  Pretty cool, and there’s a more than cogent case for trying it.

There’s one further possible modification of the Redemption Plan.  Say that John Henry, as he did after 2003, opens up his pocketbook for one more big acquisition.  If you want to keep the same club basically in place, but want to add a few wins, the obvious choice is Jose Reyes.  Reyes’ injury history obviously terrifies me, but a healthy Reyes could be the best acquisition of the offseason.  Call it Redemption Plus.  (Conceivably Redemption Plus could involve going after CC Sabathia, but I think CC is going to re-sign reasonably quickly with the Yankees and would not be worth the effort of bidding.)

Then there’s Trader Theo.  (You can replace Theo with your imagined new GM if you feel like it.)  As I argued in the other thread, “blow it up” is not a plan. You need to make the team better.  If you are convinced that Carl Crawford or John Lackey is cooked as a player, you need to not merely get rid of them, you need to replace them with All-Star level production.  That’s the hard part.  Dumping bad players doesn’t make the club better - only good players can do that.

The simplest way to find a star is to pay him a truckload of money.  Albert Pujols seems like the obvious target, given his status as by far the greatest player of his generation and currently the greatest player in baseball.  The reason this is a Trader Theo plan is that with Gonzalez locked in at 1B and flashing a great glove there, the way to get value out of Pujols is to make a secondary trade.  One option is to see if you could get real talent in trade for Gonzalez, and improve the team by adding Pujols plus the new talent from the Gonzalez trade.  Another option would be to look into trading Crawford and considering Pujols for the newly open LF slot, or to look into playing Pujols at 3B, and seeing what kind of trade market exists for Youkilis.  (I guess there’s another Redemption Plus option where you let Papi walk, you make it rain for Pujols, and you split 1B/3B/DH duties between Youks, Gonzalez, and Pujols.)  Obviously this all would depend on Pujols’ interest in a positional shift - unless you trade Gonzalez - but Albert surely got the talent for it, so the question would simply be his interest.

The other path for Trader Theo is simply to make some blockbuster talent-for-talent trades.  The terrible year down on the farm has left this club with very few trade chits, and the disaster at the back of the rotation was partly a function of this club trading away their best pitching prospects of the last few years.  That leaves talent-for-talent blockbusters, which are as rare as they are impossible to predict.  So I have no particular idea about what the Sox ought to go after or what they ought to offer – Reddick, Bard, and Middlebrooks for King Felix! /SoSH – but it should be noted that Trader Theo includes the option of just going crazy on the trade market.