Red Sox battle fading relevance
Team brass: Lack of competitive product ‘keeps these guys up at night’
For the fourth time in nine years, the Red Sox are at another low point.
For all the success they’ve had since John Henry bought the franchise in 2002 — winning four championships since, the most in baseball — the Red Sox have also endured their fair share of sinking to the bottom. Their last-place AL East finish in 2020 marked the fourth time since 2012 that they’ve finished in the cellar, a stunning reality for one of the highest spending teams in baseball.
“I can tell you that it wasn’t by design,” Red Sox president Sam Kennedy said Tuesday.
And yet, the theme remains that the Red Sox have continued to alternate between the extremes, with two championships in that span sandwiched by some of the most embarrassing seasons in franchise history. If they had it their way, it would continue with a return to glory in 2021, however unlikely that seems right now.
Until then, though, the Red Sox have to deal with this harsh reality: Just two years after probably their best season in franchise history, their relevance is decreasing in a sports town that has become to expect greatness from all its teams. The Celtics are on the rise, the Bruins are an annual playoff team and the Patriots still have Bill Belichick running the show. The Red Sox, meanwhile, are collecting dust.
This 2020 team was mostly an unwatchable product. That and the 7:30 start times did nothing but push the decline of fan interest, and now the Red Sox face a steep climb in just performing the bare minimum: staying relevant.
“To me, relevancy speaks to competitiveness and we need to be competitive year in and year out,” Kennedy said. “Am I worried about not being competitive? Yes. Very worried. It keeps me up at night. I know it keeps these guys (chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom and general manager Brian O’halloran) up at night. We’re here to win championships. We want our fifth ring. We’ve got four of them, we want our fifth, and we’re going to do everything we can this offseason, next year, into ’22 and beyond to bring another World Series championship to Red Sox fans. That’s what they deserve, and we’re going to do everything we can to make that happen. …
“When you have a difficult season and you don’t perform at a high level, obviously fan interest wanes. We’re cognizant of that. It’s our job to do everything we can to be as competitive as possible so that interest level comes back.”
The word Kennedy stressed during Tuesday’s 50-minute endof-season press conference was consistency. Kennedy, by nature, portrays optimism even during the lowest of lows, but even he is aware that the Red Sox have lacked sustainable competitiveness over the last decade.
“As I look back over our 20 years here, we’ve had obviously disappointing seasons before. We’ve had some high highs and some championship wins,” Kennedy said in his opening remarks. “One thing that we’ve been lacking is consistency with our competitiveness, I think it’s important to acknowledge that. And that is clearly something that we’re working towards with Chaim Bloom at the top of our baseball operations department.
“We’re excited about building. We’re optimistic about the future, and looking forward to better days ahead for the organization and Red Sox fans.”
As Kennedy said, Bloom and his team will be hard at work in what will be a critical winter, even if the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic affects how they can do business. But from Day 1, Bloom has always preached sustainability for the long haul, with no guarantees on when championship aspirations come to fruition. It’s part of the reason why he traded Mookie Betts in February.
Bloom was predictably vague in revealing specific goals or needs in his offseason agenda. Of course, pitching — after the Red Sox had the third-worst team ERA in baseball — will be at the top of the list. Bloom said regardless, building championship-level pitching depth is always something he’s looking for. It starts there.
But for Bloom, it’s all centered around that basic principle.
“I think if you’re looking at consistent and sustainable competitiveness, I think the history of the Red Sox has borne this out, you set yourself up best for that by maximizing the core of young players that you have long runways with,” Bloom said. “We always need to be looking to do that. I think you should always be looking to do that no matter where you are in a competitive cycle so that’s something that always has to be a focus.”
How close are the Red Sox? It may not have shown on the field this year, but they believe they’re making progress.
“I think we’ve made some progress,” O’halloran said. “Obviously we’re not where we need to be yet and it’s a process that is never going to be over. We’re going to constantly be trying to add talent to the organization and continue to build and supplement the core and have a deep roster, as we talked about. But I do think we’ve made progress in the last year, primarily through trades but also adding through the draft in different ways. But more work to be done.”