Factors that help to build talent base can’t be ignored very long
BOSTON — As much as the Red Sox hope that the turn from 2020 to 2021 brings a change in results, their mission is largely similar to the one that guided them throughout last season’s last-place debacle.
The pursuit of long-term, sustainable success requires the ongoing repair and replenishment of a young talent base.
“Good organizations that want to sustain competitiveness over time and avoid the valleys always focus on where their talent base is at, where their pipeline is at,” said Red Sox chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom. “If you ever stop worrying about the future entirely, you’re sort of dooming yourself to not have a very good one.
“If our goal is to be competitive as much as possible and ideally always, then some part of our energy always has to be focused on making sure that pipeline is strong.”
Given that, it’s worth asking: How did a team ranked by Baseball America with a top-six farm system entering each of the 2013-16 seasons end up, by the end of 2019, compelled to deal one of the greatest talents in franchise history as the first step of what proved a season-long selloff?
Prospects grew up: Two waves of prospects positioned the Red Sox with an elite farm system for much of last decade. Mookie Betts, Xander Bogaerts, Jackie Bradley Jr., Christian Vazquez, Matt Barnes, and Travis Shaw were part of a group that advanced together through the system, getting their footing at a time when the Red Sox turned over their core while finishing in last place in 2014-15.
They were joined in the subsequent years by Andrew Benintendi, Yoan Moncada, and Rafael Devers, who broke into the big leagues when the Sox were contending annually for American League East titles.
Even after the Betts trade last February, the Red Sox had an Opening Day lineup of mostly homegrown talents — Vazquez behind the plate, Bogaerts and Devers on the left side of the infield, Bradley and Benintendi in the outfield — but those players are now established, having accumulated enough big league service time to reach arbitration eligibility or free agency.
The trades they made: Under former president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski, the Red Sox traded 36 players (according to Baseball Reference), including 31 who either were minor leaguers or had yet to exhaust their rookie eligibility between the end of the 2015 season and the end of 2019. Of those 31, 19 have contributed in the big leagues with their new teams.
“These trades and these players that were used allowed us to put together arguably the greatest team and roster in the history of the organization and led us to a World Series championship [in 2018],” said Red Sox vice president of scouting Mike Rikard. “That’s the name of the game.”