I went at this for 15 years, 4 months.
In all that time, I never dug for information, never pestered, always stayed on topic. I thought it was neat how many people across the organization (and baseball) I connected with off and on, weaving through the years. It always started the same way, someone reaching out, and me immediately apologizing for not always tweeting with the rosiest of team-colored glasses on. I never once got a reply to that other than some form of, “no worries, you always back up what you say.”
The best compliment I ever received was someone important saying the people that followed me were getting the closest thing online to real-time front office thinking.
Through the Mookie Betts saga, and through the rebuild, the team talked of following their guiding star. I feel like I’m the one that has the most egg on their face for having faith in how the team was going to come out on the other side, as opposed to where they have actually landed in the post-2018 nightmare.
The next time someone who works at, or is around Fenway all the time, tells me a positive story about the current workings of the front office would have been the first. It seems like some people might start digging into this more, which would be interesting, and maybe I was just privy to a small sliver of information and things are actually all kumbaya on Jersey Street…
I’d heard that by the time Chaim Bloom was fired, there were some people in baseball ops that were ready for a change. They felt Bloom’s inner circle had shrunk, and they were ready for new leadership with refreshed lines of communication. From what I’ve since been told, there is now an even smaller inner circle kept, with lines of communication being described as a courtesy, if it even gets to that point. Some personnel that were hoping for a fresh slate found the grass not greener.
The inability — or at worst unwillingness — to communicate functionally with peers makes the massive failure to successfully communicate with Raffy Devers sadly unsurprising.
Since the team hired a firm to audit how the organization operated, and the resulting restructurings, there is a feeling that somehow there are now very smart baseball people — at best — underutilized. There are also those who question how the team scouts the major leagues and upper levels of the minor leagues. It feels like how the pitching prospects are being developed will also eventually be a story.
Personally, I find it concerning how rarely the media is given opportunity to ask questions, and how infrequently the team’s decision maker evaluates the system’s own prospects in person.
Devers is no longer on the Red Sox because he hurt someone’s feelings, and that opened a window to do what the team’s proprietary computer model suggested. The team is now 100% model-driven, and it believes any contract, even an elite bat (or ace, if you’re talking pitching) can get underwater, which to me is an absolutely stunning fundamental flaw in the real-world ability to win important-fucking-games.
From what I’ve heard, around baseball, this trade is getting skewered to a stunning degree, even as teams acknowledge that technically their own models spit out the same. The timing and haste of this is almost more absurd than the actual act of trading.
Anyway. This seems like a good off-ramp to wrap this whole thing up. I’ll be actively rooting for the next regime change, and for when FSG finishes up all their real estate development around Fenway and they put the team up for sale.
Sincerely, thank you