Dombro, all GMs play waiting game

Dave Dombrowski worked from home yesterday. There was so much snow on the ground, driving to his Fenway Park office made little sense, and besides, his cell phone would work from anywhere.

Any other winter, perhaps Dombrowski could have taken the day off, but not this one. Not with the free agent market still log-jammed, and not with the Red Sox still in need of a bat.

“I wouldn’t use the word frustrating,” Dombrowski said in a phone call with the Herald. “Because I think you just, every year, you have to deal with whatever the market is. Every year I get asked the question: What do you anticipate this year on the free agent market? Do you think it’s going to be this (or that)? And my answer is stock, but it’s true, and it’s that I never know. You just never know.”

The Red Sox president of baseball operations has been building baseball teams for four decades, and he said this winter is not particularly unusual aside from the pace. Conversations are happening daily. GMs are talking trades, agents are talking dollars, and front offices are evaluating opportunities.

It’s business as usual, except it’s early January and the market still hasn’t found the momentum that usually kicks in around early December.

“Usually when you come back from the holidays, not that you’re not still on the phone a little bit, phone calls or texting, but there’s a little bit of downtime,” Dombrowski said. “Usually you’re focused on spring training, arbitration contract negotiations, and your PR stuff like your Winter Weekend. Well, this year is much different. There’s numerous conversations taking place, not only with our club, but with other clubs

about trades and there are free agents out there. So, there’s a lot taking place that normally has already happened. So, it just makes it a different type of winter for me. Now, when I say that, what’s a little bit different, it’s not like we weren’t on the phone and busy in December and the winter meetings, we just didn’t accomplish anything.”

Didn’t accomplish much, he should say. Dombrowski was quick to correct himself in that regard. The team resigned Mitch Moreland, a move Dombrowski labeled as “very important,” but he acknowledged the Red Sox haven’t done a lot more.

“But the industry hasn’t

done a lot more,” he said. Why is that?

“I cannot answer that,” Dombrowski said, before doing his very best to answer that.

“Anything is really a guess, because I don’t really know. Some free agents just have waited longer to make decisions. There seems to be quite a few players that are still (soon to be) bigname free agents (whose) names are at least bandied about as far as trade conversations are concerned. I don’t know if some clubs are focused on next year’s free agency and aren’t really participating in this year’s free agency as much. Agents are waiting for them to jump in. I don’t really know the answer. Those are only guesses, but I guess it isn’t because of lack of conversations, because the conversations have been just as numerous as in the past, but it just hasn’t led to results.”

Dombrowski largely dismissed the theory that advanced analytics have left every general manager searching for the same types of players, creating indifference toward some free agents and lengthy negotiations for others.

“Even analytics can be used in different ways,” he said.

And he wouldn’t comment on the fact many of the market’s top free agents — including known Red Sox target J.D. Martinez — are represented by Scott Boras, an agent notorious for his willingness to wait for the biggest contract possible.

“I wouldn’t want to get into specifics on that,” Dombrowski said.

In his first two Boston winters, Dombrowski moved quickly. He traded for Craig Kimbrel in November 2015, and last year he added Chris Sale the first week of December. All that was left to be done his past two Januarys were plugging smaller holes with Craig Breslow, Robbie Ross, Kyle Kendrick and Steve Selsky.

This January, the big splash has yet to come, and so Dombrowski makes his phone calls, sends his emails, and waits.

“You’d love to be done,” he said. “But I think what you have to do is, you can’t rush things into making bad decisions or decisions you regret. You need to continue to think them through and talk to your people and work things through and not make decisions impulsively and use all of the resources you have at hand between scouts and analytics. Then you go on everything and you keep marching through it and keep working through. Hopefully, you make wise decisions.”

‘You can’t rush things into making bad decisions or decisions you regret.’ — DAVE DOMBROWSKI On quiet winter for Sox