2020 is in Bloom

While anything official will wait for the end of the World Series multiple reports (Joel Sherman, Rob Bradford among others) are reporting that the Red Sox are hiring Chaim Bloom* as their next General Manager**.

* see what I did with the title?
** I don’t care about titles, he’s doing the job traditionally associated with GM so that’s what I’m calling him

On all of these hires we really know so very little about the people involved that it is hard to make any particularly substantive calls.  However the early reports are glowing to the point of infatuation but as a Sox fan it is hard not to feel good about it.  The one recurring theme I am seeing in multiple places is he is very good at working with others.  This seems in direct contrast to Dombrowski who was more of a traditional/old school leader but sometimes didn’t allow the smart people elsewhere in the organization to thrive.  The Sox are reported to have very good people throughout the organization including of course the group of four executives (Raquel Ferreira, Brian O’Halloran, Eddie Romero, and Zack Scott) who have been tasked with keeping the organization going during this phase of transition.

Of course Bloom is inheriting a very talented team but also one with some difficult decisions ahead of it.  One thing I wanted to take a look at in hopes that it might give some insight into Bloom is how Andrew Friedman handled the transition from small market Tampa to huge market Los Angeles.  Unfortunately I don’t think there are a lot of comps there as the Dodgers did not have the same types of decisions.  One can make an argument that Matt Kemp, whose trade was engineered by Friedman almost immediately, is similar to Mookie Betts but that’s a bit of a reach.  Kemp was three years older than Betts is now and over the previous three seasons his combined WAR was still less than what Mookie did in 2018 and he had only had one season (2011) equivalent to Mookie’s 2019 season.

I think what we CAN learn from Kemp, and other decisions, is that Friedman was willing to make difficult decisions.  The 2014 Dodgers looked like this for game one of the NLDS;

Dee Gordon 2B
Yasiel Puig RF
Adrian Gonzalez 1B
Matt Kemp CF
Hanley Ramirez SS
Carl Crawford LF
Juan Uribe 3B
AJ Ellis C
Clayton Kershaw P
Kenley Jansen CL

When they suited up for game seven of the 2017 World Series their lineup looked like this;

Chris Taylor CF
Corey Seager SS
Justin Turner 3B
Clay Bellinger 1B
Yasiel Puig RF
Joc Pederson LF
Logan Forsythe 2B
Austin Barnes C
Yu Darvish P
Kenley Jansen CL

Obviously Kershaw was still on the roster in 2017 but other than that Puig was the only returner.  Now part of that is the 2014 Dodgers had more in common with say the 2004 Sox than the 2019 team with a lot of older players at the tail end of their contracts.  What strikes me about what Friedman did is that he had success promoting and/or developing young players (Seager, Bellinger, Pederson)  but also success bringing in older players to fill roles either in big names (like Darvish) or on the more role player type (Rich Hill, Logan Forsythe).  I include Jansen because I think it shows a willingness to not be slavish to certain concepts while his overall body of work shows a willingness to embrace innovation.

Why all this talk about Friedman?  As I said we really don’t know enough about Bloom to make strong evaluations.  What I see with Friedman is a Rays executive who was able to navigate both the big name/big money aspects of GMing and the bargain basement hunting aspect.  Of course Friedman is one of the best in the biz but even if his former protege Bloom is not as good if he comes in with the type of open mind that Friedman has displayed that should serve the Sox well.

Oh and Chaim, sign Mookie Betts.