Now that we’re past the trade deadline, what’s the long-term outlook for the Red Sox?
The future in 2021 and beyond is just that, with some ugly baseball days all that's promised in September.
COMMENTARY
On Monday in this space, we offered the optimist’s view of this Boylston death march of a baseball campaign. An attempt to reach into history for some hope, and a reflection that Red Sox seasons like these often either nurture the pieces for the eventual turnaround or are the catalyst for the change that changes everything.
This morning, the colder reality. We’re only maybe in midstream, and the clarity of hindsight is still on the other side of the horizon.
Chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom understood the opportunity before him with Monday’s trade deadline. A seller’s market like few of recent years, and a freedom — granted both by the circumstances of this partial season and that his bosses are the villains in the “who traded Mookie Betts” story — to do whatever it takes to better a club that needs to be better in myriad ways.
Alas, the next great Red Sox team probably won’t be built any faster than Rome was. Monday brought a flurry of action across the sport, but Boston’s involvement was limited to outfielder Kevin Pillar and reliever Josh Osich departing for players to be named later and, in Pillar’s case, some international signing bonus money.
For guys who played 30 and 13 games respectively in Red Sox uniforms, it’s a good return on investment. It’s just more the slow, responsible wealth building kind, versus pouring your life savings into Tesla options.
“With some of these trades, we’ve added more contributors that I think can start to form out next core,” Bloom said on Monday, reflecting on the totality of dealing Brandon Workman, Heath Hembree, Mitch Moreland, Pillar, and Osich. “We still have work to do to continue building that core . . . we’re looking forward to putting more contributors in place.”
On the same day the Bruins core might’ve sealed the same underwhelming fate as the Pierce/Garnett/Allen Celtics — just one title, with a crushing Game 7 costing them a second — and The Fours closing its Boston flagship, Monday’s competitive loss to a good Atlanta team was downright sunshine and rainbows. The Red Sox actually had the best outing yet this season against Cy Young contender Max Fried, Alex Verdugo had three doubles and created a run with aggressive baserunning, and Rafael Devers and Xander Bogaerts had RBIs. Even Phillips Valdez, after failing to escape the bases-loaded mess he was left, struck out three in a row.
In that were glimmers of what could be on the other side of this. Pieces to the answer to the puzzle. Tuesday had a couple of those too.
It also would’ve felt a lot better if all our TVs exploded before the seventh.
Marcell Ozuna’s third home run for the Braves was measured at 437 feet. It harkened to a ball Alex Rodriguez hit 15 years ago off Curt Schilling, the latter returning in July as a closer after three months off. Chris Snow, writing in the Globe, noted with “another 5 to 10 feet of lift” on the obliterated splitter, the ball “would have cleared the wall in center field to the right of the flag pole and exited Fenway, a feat last accomplished by Jim Rice in 1975, and only six times since Fenway’s inception.”
That shot, as well as Ozuna’s prior homer, came off Kyle Hart, whose major-league career has a good chance of beginning and ending in this shortened season. After allowing seven hits and six runs Tuesday, hitters have a .421 batting average against him, and nearly every advanced metric has Hart among the bottom five percent of pitchers used in the majors this season.
“Sometimes at the end when you get a score like this you look at it and say, ‘Well, they were out of it from the beginning,’ but that wasn’t the case,” manager Ron Roenicke told reporters Tuesday night after a 10-3 loss. “You play hard, you play close, and then all of a sudden you have a blowout.”
This is less a bad team than a full-on open tryout, striking even considering more than 150 players have already made their major-league debuts this season. Jonathan Arauz, who muffed a tough play at second for a run on Monday, was playing at Corpus Christi, Texas, a year ago. A debuting Robinson Leyer, similarly in Double A last year, pitched Monday. Lefty Mike Kickham, who hasn’t pitched in the majors since 2014, starts Wednesday.
Hey, merely completing the season in a pandemic-wracked world was a success, right? These Red Sox are the literal picture of that, having now played enough to secure the luxury-tax reset around all of this has orbited. If only they could simply stop, given 21 of their final 24 games are against either a division leader (Atlanta and Tampa Bay) or a team in true playoff contention (Toronto, Philadelphia, Miami, and the Yankees). The Celtics, coalescing around a pair of third overall picks and a well-traveled ninth out of UConn, can’t stick around as a distraction long enough.
Even they, the Patriots, the Revolution, and a ‘Cheers’ reboot might not be sufficient to paper over this mess. The Astros lost 416 games from 2011-14 to get the top picks that became Carlos Correa and Alex Bregman, and that’s while squandering two other No. 1s. The Cubs went a little quicker, though they’d finished last in five straight years when the yield of Javier Baez, Kris Bryant, and Kyle Schwarber (plus Anthony Rizzo, acquired via trade) got them on their way.
Worst to first has become a way of life here. Last place in 2012, world champs in 2013. Last place in 2014-15, division champions in 2016-17, world champions in 2018. Ninth in the American League in 1966, pennant winners in 1967. Seventh in 1945, 104 victories in 1946. That’s a tough thing to keep expecting, though there’s a least a chance this follows that path. The 2021 Red Sox should get back both Eduardo Rodriguez and Chris Sale to the rotation, and with the economics of the sport (and everything else) in shambles, who knows what this winter could look like.
Whether we needed to be here this season? Whether Mookie Betts couldn’t be resigned and needed to be dealt? Whether a plan of “let the smart guy from Tampa figure it out” is a real plan? Questions with no good answers. Questions we can’t answer until years down the road.
The golden era is over. We’re back to waiting, and taking what we can get.
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