Bloom’s first Sox rotation a mess
Sign Godley hoping to bolster pitching
If this wasn’t a 60-game season, and if there wasn’t a global pandemic to worry about, we might be spending a lot more time wondering why the Red Sox’ rotation is as bad as it’s been… ever?
And Chaim Bloom, the 37year-old who fit the Ivy League mold of so many baseball executives before him, was brought to Boston from the Tampa Bay Rays last fall primarily to recreate the pitching haven that Tampa has been for more than a decade.
In each of the last 10 years, Bloom’s Rays finished the season with at least one starting pitcher who generated a 3.0 WAR season or better. The names most often on that list are names Red Sox fans should remember from their time carving up hitters in the American League East: James Shields, David Price, Chris Archer, Alex Cobb, Charlie Morton and Blake Snell, among others.
They sat atop a Rays’ pitching staff that ranked sixth out of 30 MLB teams in total WAR over the last decade, despite the club never spending more than $76 million on an Opening Day payroll.
Here’s the projected Red Sox’ starting rotation, and their career ERAs, with Opening Day on Friday: Nathan Eovaldi (4.54 ERA), Martin Perez (4.72), Ryan Weber (5.04) and Brian Johnson (4.74).
This for a Red Sox team with a payroll around $186 million.
Asked about the rotation on Friday, Bloom said, “It’s definitely more unsettled than I think you would want.”
Unsettled is one way to describe it. Disaster is another. Embarrassment might be pushing it, but only because we don’t know how the season will play out.
Barring a miracle, the Red Sox will have questions to answer for putting together such a crew.
But is it Bloom’s fault? Dave Dombrowski’s? John Henry’s?
It isn’t Bloom’s fault Eduardo Rodriguez contracted the coronavirus and will be out indefinitely (though he is now in Boston, presumably awaiting multiple negative tests before he can begin training at Fenway Park).
And it isn’t Bloom’s fault Chris Sale needed Tommy John surgery, but we can wonder if, having taken over the team in October, when Sale was already experiencing elbow problems, Bloom’s Red Sox could’ve better prepared for a season without him.
He was also up against financial constraints — the fault of Dombrowski and Henry — which largely led to the decision to trade Mookie Betts and Price to the Dodgers.
It’s actually quite difficult to assign much blame to Bloom as it pertains to the starting rotation.
But what he does about it going forward is where Bloom can really make his mark.
Talking about it Friday, he said something interesting. Bloom said the goal wasn’t to make the team better, but mostly to keep the team healthy. He didn’t need aces; he needed bodies.
“We came into this camp with a goal of getting a number of these guys stretched out so that we would have options, not just to be able to evaluate them, but so we’d have options available starting with our first game,” Bloom said. “And I think we’ve put ourselves in that situation. Now we have to make those decisions on how we can most productively roll these guys out in order to win games.”
The players Bloom drafts, signs, claims, trades for and develops will establish his reputation for a Red Sox franchise that’s been 0-for-their-lastmillion when it comes to finding homegrown starters.
Though the transaction ban was lifted and teams are free to trade and sign free agents, the Red Sox have sat mostly still on the pitching front, only adding Zack Godley (career 4.68 ERA) to their group last night.
“When we came to spring training, we were looking forward to having (Sale and Rodriguez) in our rotation, and obviously we hope sooner rather than later they’ll be able to be,” Bloom said. “So it’s a bummer not to have those guys but with that said, I think you look at someone like (Nathan Eovaldi), he’s shown that when he’s at his best, he can hang with any of those guys (we had on the Rays).
“For us to have a good season from a run prevention standpoint, I think some of these guys are going to have to step up. They’re going to have the opportunity to do so. They all have different ingredients that they bring to the table that give us reasons to be optimistic.”
But, Bloom conceded, it’s the offense that will surely have to carry the team if they’re to have any success this year.
The Sox are still looking for upgrades in the rotation, Bloom said, but he couldn’t say if they’d find any.
At this point, he might as well wait. The season could be over in four weeks if the Sox aren’t fast out of the gate.
And the phone calls Bloom will be making to other teams won’t be about upgrading his rotation, but downgrading in hopes of getting younger as he continues to focus on the future, leaving this year’s team as messy and unpredictable as the world around it.