Baseball for the Thinking Fan

Login | Register | Feedback

btf_logo
You are here > Home > Baseball Newsstand > Discussion
Baseball Primer Newsblog
— The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand

Monday, December 19, 2022

Inside the Red Sox’s free agency plans after Xander Bogaerts

The ownership group fired Dombrowski before the end of the 2019 season, less than a year after winning the World Series, and mandated the team cut salary in order to reset the luxury tax penalties. In came Bloom—whom Boston hired from the Tampa Bay Rays—with a vision of creating a Dodgers-style of sustained success, spending big money on star players while consistently developing top prospects to fill out the lineup.

It’s pretty funny saying they want a “Dodgers-style of sustained success” when the Red Sox traded Mookie Betts to the Dodgers who signed him. You keep your young superstar players and get them locked up early, you don’t let them dangle until they get close to free agency. (Also see Bogaerts.)

According to multiple sources, Boston’s ownership group did not mandate that Bloom trade Betts to get under the luxury tax. But that is what Bloom ultimately decided to do, with an eye toward increasing the Red Sox’s options in the future. The team traded Betts and Price to Los Angeles for Alex Verdugo, Jeter Downs and Connor Wong. And Betts eventually signed a 12-year, $365 million contract with the Dodgers—a deal he told ESPN in August that he would have accepted in Boston.

I hope Bloom likes the criticism from multiple sources in the know. I’m sure those sources aren’t owner friendly. /s

Of course, if this is true, Bloom shouldn’t be in charge.

Have we made wrong decisions in the past? Lots of them,” Kennedy said. “You can’t sit around regretting mistakes of the past. That’s not a good recipe. We respect Mookie and it’s a hard decision, but we’ve moved on.”

Sure, you “can’t sit around regretting mistakes of the past.” But, you should remember and learn from them. Repeating the same mistakes over and over don’t point to the latter.

As the team builds the roster for 2023, some within the Red Sox front office have questioned Bloom’s decision-making process, team sources told ESPN. One front-office official said Bloom’s deliberate process toward making moves—asking many people for their input before making a decision—can put the Red Sox in a position to fall behind, reacting to other teams versus setting the market.

“I think we have a culture where people can and do express directly to me when they disagree with something,” Bloom said. “We have a lot of people in the loop on transactions that we make and we have a lot of really good debate. We have a place where people can share their opinion and have it be heard.”

More anonymous sources laying the groundwork for the future.

Anyway, there is a lot of other good stuff in the article, including info about Bogaerts willingness to take an extension after Story signed.

“I’m not sure how to respond to that,” Bloom said. “I certainly think we’ve made some large commitments in the time I’ve been here. For people who would’ve liked to have seen more, that’s their right. I think a lot of circumstances under which I joined the organization really precluded that for a period of time. I would argue we would’ve been worse off certainly prior to 2021 had we listened to people who wanted to see us make a splash instead of building a good baseball team.”

It’s not about the spending for me. It’s about the right spending. A team has to properly evaluate their best young players and get them signed as soon as they can. They can’t fritter away cash on mediocity and not spend money to keep their best homegrown players.

Betts and Bogaerts should have been able to fit within the Red Sox long-term budget. Alas, they can’t go back. Now they either have to overpay to keep Devers or be doomed to repeat the same mistake, again.

Ugh.

jimfurtado Posted: December 19, 2022 at 10:18 AM | 14 comment(s) Login to Bookmark
  Tags: chaim bloom, mookie betts, rafael devers, red sox, xander bogaerts

Reader Comments and Retorts

Go to end of page

Statements posted here are those of our readers and do not represent the BaseballThinkFactory. Names are provided by the poster and are not verified. We ask that posters follow our submission policy. Please report any inappropriate comments.

   1. Nasty Nate Posted: December 19, 2022 at 11:21 AM (#6110117)
Clearly, Joon Lee is acting here as a media mouthpiece for the Red Sox front office. Take this as a sign that the Red Sox are trying to unload Chaim Bloom, and are looking to tear down public opinion of Bloom so they'll look good when they drop him.
   2. jmurph Posted: December 19, 2022 at 11:35 AM (#6110119)
According to multiple sources, Boston’s ownership group did not mandate that Bloom trade Betts to get under the luxury tax. But that is what Bloom ultimately decided to do, with an eye toward increasing the Red Sox’s options in the future.

This is either total cowardice from ownership or Bloom stepping up unnecessarily to take the heat off of ownership, which would seem to... also point to total cowardice from ownership.

The alternative, that you're letting your GM trade away a future Hall of Famer in his prime without your input, also doesn't look good. There's no good interpretation of this!
   3. Textbook Editor Posted: December 19, 2022 at 11:44 AM (#6110121)
OK, so Bloom is basically toast is my read on all of this. Who's next up? Who would even want the job?

This has all gone so badly, so quickly, that I'm starting to doubt Bloom even makes it to Opening Day.
   4. Steve Balboni's Personal Trainer Posted: December 19, 2022 at 12:15 PM (#6110123)
Management appears to dramatically underestimate a few things:

1) The PTSD our base has about the Mookie trade. He should have been our generational guy. Seeing Bogaerts - who nobody is saying is as good as Betts, but is a beloved player in New England, and is very good - leave for nothing presses all the wrong buttons. And you could see this coming more than a year away.

2) The standard has changed from the fans' perspective. Were we spoiled from 2001-2018? You bet. But it has raised the bar for a generation in the region for what a "good year" is. We want to be competing for championships. For ownership, they are being compared not even to other baseball owners. They are compared to the Bob Kraft (of the Patriots) and Wyk Grousbeck (of the Celtics), who have demonstrated a commitment to building consistent winners. You don't win the title every year (though, for a while, it seemed that way!), but you should demonstrating a plan for being in the conversation most years.

3) The fans' willingness to be patient, if they trust you. And the way you earn their trust is by showing you have a plan. It seems in opposition to point #2, above, but the Celtics showed that you can retain the love and commitment of the fan base if you show you are working off of a plan. Those lean years in the 2010s were nonetheless fascinating because you see "Trader Danny" Ainge working every angle, grabbing every draft pick, showing 100% fidelity to the franchise and its betterment. (It helps that he had won a title in 2008, and was a member of those 1980s great Celtics teams himself.) Bloom had some goodwill entering the job - almost like he was Theo Epstein 2.0 in training - but it is gone.

I want 2023 to be a step forward in a plan, not another "stitch it together" team of veterans on short-term contracts - even if it means winning fewer games this year.
   5. Nasty Nate Posted: December 19, 2022 at 12:43 PM (#6110128)
I want 2023 to be a step forward in a plan, not another "stitch it together" team of veterans on short-term contracts - even if it means winning fewer games this year.
It hypothetically can be both. And both is what they should aim for. The stitch-it-together veterans of the 2013 and 2021 teams didn't hamper any long-term plan in any meaningful way. The problem right now is they don't have any plan, they only have the stitch it together part.
   6. The Yankee Clapper Posted: December 19, 2022 at 12:45 PM (#6110129)
You keep your young superstar players and get them locked up early, you don’t let them dangle until they get close to free agency.
I think you go a step more. If your legitimate superstar player does reach free agency, you offer fair market value. Guys like Mookie Betts & Aaron Judge are worth a lot for their original team to retain, even if the last few years of the contract might be somewhat of an overpay. Management can’t ‘win’ every contract negotiation.
   7. Walt Davis Posted: December 19, 2022 at 02:20 PM (#6110133)
And Betts eventually signed a 12-year, $365 million contract with the Dodgers—a deal he told ESPN in August that he would have accepted in Boston.

I don't know that I really buy this. Obviously I don't live in Mookie's head ... or possibly Mookie means that if he'd still been in Boston in July 2020, he'd have signed this. My point is this deal, given its length and heavily deferred structure (about 1/3 is paid after the contract expires) was a huge bargain for the Dodgers. I understood Mookie signing it -- in the middle of a pandemic, a season with no fans and massively reduced revenue, not knowing when fans would be back at all or whether future revenues would recover. But if he had signed this deal in July 2019, I would have said he made a big mistake.

The bit on Story/X is kinda interesting. It says X would have accepted a similar deal but that all they offered was a 1/$30 extension on the 3/$60. First, that's not as bad as it sounds, 4/$90 would have been about the same AAV as Story (negotiate it up to 4/$94) ... but they are the same age so why two years shorter. I've said all along that was a weird signing and really only made sense to me if Boston had decided they hoped X would opt out and Story was his replacement. Otherwise if I only want one of them, I take the 6/$140 offer to X (or 5/$115 if I'm being cheap) then, if he declines, I sign Story. Or if I seriously want them both, I go to X and say "we're about to sign Story for 6/$140, is that cool with you and would you like the same deal?" On paper they were quite similar players, play the same position but one guy is homegrown -- wanting both is a bit weird, wanting the new guy over your fan fave would be even weirder. There's no way I make that offer to Story without having first made it to X even if I do want them both ... unless of course I've decided I want Story, not X.

It's not like it's Jeter-ARod but the Yanks did make it clear to Jeter from the start that ARod was not his competition.
   8. The Yankee Clapper Posted: December 19, 2022 at 03:20 PM (#6110136)
I understood Mookie signing it -- in the middle of a pandemic, a season with no fans and massively reduced revenue, not knowing when fans would be back at all or whether future revenues would recover. But if he had signed this deal in July 2019, I would have said he made a big mistake.
That would still have been the largest contract in MLB history, unless one adds the remaining 2 years Mike Trout had on his existing contract to his $360M extension. Pretty good deal even without free agency. With the recent surge in long-term contracts to elite players maybe it looks a little low now, but I don’t know that would really have been the case in 2019.
   9. villageidiom Posted: December 19, 2022 at 04:02 PM (#6110147)
This is either total cowardice from ownership or Bloom stepping up unnecessarily to take the heat off of ownership, which would seem to... also point to total cowardice from ownership.
They mandated that they trade away players & salary to get under the threshold. Trading J.D. Martinez was one of the options, at least on paper. I'd said many times that it wasn't a viable option if you wanted something of value in return, because any team trading for him didn't know if he'd opt out in a year. And as I said at the time, you can break the Betts trade into multiple components, one of which was {David Price and half his salary, for nothing} and that component wouldn't have been taken by anyone, while the remaining components were so incredibly favorable to trade partners that there's no way Boston would do those alone. The Betts trade was the Price salary-dump trade, because you couldn't motivate anyone to take on that much salary without getting something of substantial value in return.

Anyway, there is a lot of other good stuff in the article, including info about Bogaerts willingness to take an extension after Story signed.
In his interview with Bradford, Scott Boras said that Bogaerts' contract ended up around what his staff had forecasted before the season what the free agent market would be. If that were true, then it is absolute bullshit that Bogaerts would have accepted the Story deal. He would have accepted the phone call, perhaps. In the interview Boras was asked if Boston being so far off the mark means Boston's forecasts were wrong. He answered that a lot of times the team's forecasts are considering other factors, and alluded to the presence of Marcelo Mayer as a reason why Boston's model wouldn't suggest they should offer Bogaerts an 11-year deal.
   10. The Duke Posted: December 19, 2022 at 04:10 PM (#6110149)
Having lived in Ma, I found the Boston fans......very vocal. They've been spoiled and now the team is screwed. The GM who brought -a championship is fired, the players that won that championship are sold off for parts, and the money is now being spent on rejects, over the hill players, and Japanese vaporware. It's a sorry state of affairs.

There's a real chance Boston will have A $200 million payroll and be fifth in a five team division.

I'd be shocked if they sign Devers mostly because Devers probably doesn't want to be stuck on a declining team and he can make whatever money they will offer anywhere. My guess is Devers will be in LA as soon as the Bauer matter is settled and LAD knows what their budget is - a deadline deal.

What's worse is that bloom doesn't seem to be very good at the trading part of his job which makes matters worse.
   11. DFA Posted: December 19, 2022 at 04:58 PM (#6110154)
OK, so Bloom is basically toast is my read on all of this. Who's next up? Who would even want the job?


Dan Duquette is holding on line 2.
   12. sunday silence (again) Posted: December 19, 2022 at 08:31 PM (#6110162)
Having lived in Ma, I found the Boston fans.....


the issue is whether you have lived in Mookie's head.
   13. Walt Davis Posted: December 20, 2022 at 02:29 PM (#6110209)
That would still have been the largest contract in MLB history, unless one adds the remaining 2 years Mike Trout had on his existing contract to his $360M extension. Pretty good deal even without free agency. With the recent surge in long-term contracts to elite players maybe it looks a little low now, but I don’t know that would really have been the case in 2019.

But it's the deferred structure. 1/3 of it is paid out after the contract ends -- from Mookie's perspective it's effectively 24/$365. Even the MLBPA's very conservative NPV calculations put the total down to $308 -- it's more Corey Seager's contract than it is Trout or even Harper. Given Rendon, Strasburg had signed at $35 AAV and Cole at $36 and Arenado had a 5/$175 stretch in his deal, I think pre-pandemic Mookie was looking at 10/$350-360 without any deferral shenanigans. A straight up 12/$365 is close enough to that but that was not the deal he signed with the Dodgers.
   14. Walt Davis Posted: December 20, 2022 at 10:01 PM (#6110270)
Sorry to belabor the point but I went to the trouble of entering Mookie's torturous contract payments into the NPV calculator ... at a 3% return, I get $270. For Seager's slightly front-loaded 10/$320 I get $279. The return used by MLBPA seems to be about 1.6 which would put Mookie's around $309 and Seager's at just under $300. So like I said, in NPV terms, it's about the same as Seager's. Granted Seager's was signed more than a year after Mookie's. Machado's 10/$300, signed about two years earlier than Mookie's comes out to $275 (1.6%) so Mookie's is, give or take, Machado plus $34 M for 2 years, some of which is just inflation. Harper's deal (also 2 years earlier) was also slightly front-loaded and comes to $297 so Mookie got Harper's deal with a small tip. :-)

Now obviously "we think you're a little better than Machado, as good as Harper" is not an insult so it's not that I think he'd have been a fool to accept that prior to the pandemic. But, although I don't think he's as good as Trout, I thought he was a tier above Machado. In the middle of a pandemic, I fully understand not worrying about that stuff.

As it's turned out, the pandemic doesn't seem to have had any long-term effects on salary and while I'm not sure MLB will ever fully recover the attendance (in some relative sense), they seem to have come up with plenty of short-term revenue enhancements so that it doesn't matter, at least for now. That 2020-21 offseason though was ... maybe a little timid. Hard to say, it wasn't a super-strong pool of players. Bauer got his super deal, Springer (6/$150) and Realmuto (5/$115) did pretty well, Gausman and LeMahieu were very happy and McCann must have been stunned but there were no historic deals and a fair number of pretty tame ones. So I don't know that Mookie would have done much better if he hadn't signed the extension.

Note, with the deferments and a spread out signing bonus, Mookie doesn't seem to ever be paid more than $24 M a year in actual pre-tax income and that's just for years 8-10 of the contract. His actual pay in 2026-27 appears to be a bit smaller in raw dollars than in 2024-25. It will surely be nice to be getting a $11 M check in 2044 (might buy you lunch if current trends continue) but I'm sure the Dodgers appreciate the reduced cash flow going out during his playing career.

You must be Registered and Logged In to post comments.

 

 

<< Back to main

BBTF Partner

Dynasty League Baseball

Support BBTF

donate

Thanks to
Chicago Joe
for his generous support.

You must be logged in to view your Bookmarks.

Hot Topics

NewsblogWho is on the 2024 Baseball Hall of Fame ballot and what’s the induction process?
(275 - 11:07pm, Nov 30)
Last: Howie Menckel

Hall of MeritMock Hall of Fame 2024 Contemporary Baseball Ballot - Managers, Executives and Umpires
(20 - 10:37pm, Nov 30)
Last: Alex02

NewsblogOT - NBA Redux Thread for the End of 2023
(110 - 10:23pm, Nov 30)
Last: Fancy Pants Handle struck out swinging

NewsblogReds, RHP Nick Martinez agree to $26M deal, sources say
(6 - 9:24pm, Nov 30)
Last: Walt Davis

NewsblogJackson Chourio extension: Brewers closing in on historic deal with MLB's No. 7 prospect, per report
(12 - 9:17pm, Nov 30)
Last: Adam Starblind

NewsblogOT Soccer - World Cup Final/European Leagues Start
(287 - 8:50pm, Nov 30)
Last: AuntBea odeurs de parfum de distance sociale

NewsblogSportsnet's Ben Wagner out as voice of Blue Jays radio broadcasts
(1 - 8:44pm, Nov 30)
Last: Walt Davis

NewsblogFormer Yankee Luis Severino agrees to 1-year, $13 million deal with Mets: reports
(20 - 8:22pm, Nov 30)
Last: Howie Menckel

NewsblogAndre Dawson Wants His Hall of Fame Cap Changed to the Cubs
(45 - 7:52pm, Nov 30)
Last: It's regretful that PASTE was able to get out

NewsblogZack Britton details analytics ‘rift’ that’s plaguing Yankees
(2 - 7:18pm, Nov 30)
Last: McCoy

NewsblogSource: Cardinals adding Sonny Gray to revamped rotation
(32 - 4:22pm, Nov 30)
Last: DCA

NewsblogReds add reliever Pagán on 2-year deal
(7 - 3:55pm, Nov 30)
Last: Walt Davis

NewsblogThe future of live sports TV reaches a tipping point
(52 - 2:14pm, Nov 30)
Last: Buck Coats

NewsblogOakland-area fans start Ballers, an independent baseball team
(15 - 12:45pm, Nov 30)
Last: Der-K's no Kliph Nesteroff.

NewsblogOT: Wrestling Thread November 2014
(3018 - 10:18am, Nov 30)
Last: a brief article regarding 57i66135

Page rendered in 0.5035 seconds
48 querie(s) executed