2022 MLB World Series: Phillies success exposes Red Sox biggest mistakes

The Boston Red Sox, current cellar-dwellers in the American League East have failed their way to baseball oblivion and even worse, irrelevance, in two of the past three years. The most distressing aspect of this precipitous fall of the cliff of baseball hegemony is that it was essentially self-inflicted.

Even Houston’s brooming of the Bronx Bombers can’t assuage the pain too much (but it does help, does it not! It really does!) The onus is on the ownership of the Boston Flop Sox with their ill-advised moves and more importantly baseball operational philosophy which is currently flawed to the core. The worst was firing Dave Dombrowski (Dombro), who won a World Series in Boston in 2018.

Chaim Bloom, Boston’s Chief Baseball Officer, also shoulders responsibility with his abominable 2021-2022 offseason. Not re-signing Kyle Schwarber, trading Hunter Renfroe, and signing James Paxton went a long way toward both dismantling the 2021 Cinderella squad and not doing much to rebuild it.

Let’s take a look at two monster mistakes and their rationales (if we can even find any) to see why the Red Sox have sunk to the bottom of the baseball barrel.

Boston Red Sox biggest mistake, firing Dave Dombrowski

The Boston Red Sox’s disinterested ownership is neglectful of their former love the Boston Red Sox. They swoon over their Liverpool “football” club. That’s their business but Red Sox fans now have to live with the owners’ flawed idea of “sustainability” as a means to baseball success.

The aforementioned Dave Dombrowski is what might be termed an old-school baseball man. That in no way is to suggest that modern metrics aren’t a part of his modus operandi. They most likely are.

But as a traditional baseball man, Dombrowski’s outlook is based on acquiring the best players and going all out to win. He did that and won three American League East crowns in four years along with the World Series in 2018.

Then the penny-wise and pound-foolish ownership jettisoned him as head of the Red Sox baseball operation before even one calendar year had passed because he had a down 2019 season.

The man who won three straight Al East titles and a World Series is kicked to the curb due to one bad season. That down season allowed Dombro to be a scapegoat for the owner’s desire to cut payroll and luxury taxes and to financially downsize the operation. It was cost-cutting pure and simple.

The result was predictable. Another last-place finish in 2020 followed a somewhat miraculous 2021 run to the ALCS before being dismissed by Houston. That run was probably more of a mirage than reality, but as the old adage goes, “if ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

The Boston Red Sox management team also flopped

This leads to the second point, the fact that the new Red Sox Chief Baseball Officer Chaim Bloom, and his team executed the exact opposite of that maxim. They proceeded to a significant extent to dismantle the team that came within two games of the World Series.

Two monumental errors were not re-signing Kyle Schwarber who absolutely crushed the ball hitting 46 home runs, and is currently in the World Series with the Phillies (along with Dombro, thank you very much).

The other was trading the very solid Hunter Renfroe and his 31 home runs for the great-field-no-hit, Jackie Bradley Jr. That, as anticipated, was a disaster. Bradley didn’t even last to the end of the dismal 2022 season with Boston.

And to top it all off, the Red Sox signed James Paxton, coming off Tommy John surgery and he never threw a pitch. Those wasted resources could have been spent to re-sign Schwarber.

So there it was, the two or three major decisions by the Boston Red Sox after the 2019 season with Dombroski and more recently by Chaim Bloom that have taken this once-feared and respected franchise from the top-of-the-heap to the bottom of the barrel.

The solutions to this conundrum aren’t rocket science. First, the absentee ownership can sell the club for monstrous profits and just go somewhere else. That’s the best alternative for certain.

Second, if they regrettably stay around, they can open the purse strings and once again act like a big-market team, forget the luxury tax, and do what’s required to again become a winner.

Frankly, Chaim Bloom deserves a chance with that type of mandate to see what he can do or he can also expect to be scapegoated, as was Dombro for the failure of a system the owners mandated.

Absent those two options, Boston Red Sox fans can just sit back and watch as another woeful season of analytics, paucity of spending, and decisions on the cheap doom this club to the continued obscurity of loserdom. Unfortunately, it is what it is, until it isn’t. And it ain’t pretty.