Boston Red Sox: 3 bad strategies that stifle team’s success

The Boston Red Sox are not a good baseball team and this offseason’s activity is not adding much to change that observation. They are a last-place team in the American League East deservedly so and it’s no accident. It’s due to poor strategic decision-making.

The ownership of the team presumably supports the current direction but the man in charge day-to-day is Chief Baseball Officer, Chaim Bloom. Bloom has had an up-and-down tenure in his first three years in Boston after he replaced the wildly successful Dave Dombrowski.

Those were big shoes to fill and thus far he’s nowhere close to filling them. Whether this direction and the budget were set by the absentee ownership or Bloom’s own decisions, in two of his three years at the helm he’s found his team firmly ensconced in last place in the AL East.

There have been three major areas of flawed strategic decision-making within the past five years since 2019 and Dombrowski’s firing that punctuate this precipitous fall. Let’s take a look at those mistakes.

Boston Red Sox three strategic errors that dump them into last place

First, the Red Sox since 2018 has eschewed the superstar route and sought to economize, aka go cheap, by trying to aggregate any number of mediocre players instead. It’s sort of a “sum of the parts equals the whole” theory. It can work but doesn’t very often.

Bloom got the ball rolling on this method by dealing one of baseball’s best and soon-to-be most expensive players, superstar Mookie Betts. An old saying warns, “you get what you pay for”.

They decided to trade Betts for one average major league-ready player and two prospects, a complete disaster. Only Alex Verdugo has been a starter and the two prospects, Connor Wong and Jeter Downs (DFA’d recently) have not been a factor.

He has also just lost another All-Star, Xander Bogaerts in free agency. While this space doesn’t have a problem with the player leaving, the continuation of the precedent is what’s at issue. Trade him (the last offseason was optimum) for top major league value? Fine. Replace him with another and more reasonably priced top MLB player? Fine. The Sox just let him walk. Not good.