Happy Opening Day, Take 2
Good things are worth waiting for more than once
It’s been a while since the Red Sox lost an opening day game to weather. Usually they just lose to the Orioles or Blue Jays. They’ll have a chance to rectify that today, Friday, April 2, when they face the Orioles at a slightly moist Fenway Park. The missed opening day was disappointing, but hey, at least we got to watch the Yankees lose in 10 innings to Toronto. It’s the small victories, folks.
And tomorrow, when most other teams are off, we get the Red Sox. Finally.
Probably.
As long as the game doesn’t take place at 4am I’m optimistic we should be able to pull this one off.
But with a bit of time to kill, I think it’s worth discussing two things: first, have you listened to the Sox Outsider Podcast yet? No? Well check it out! I talked to Red from Surviving Grady yesterday, I discussed the Red Sox roster and previewed the season a few days before that, and the day before that, I spoke to Steven Goldman of Baseball Prospectus and The Infinite Inning podcast. There’s lots more to come this year, so give it a listen. Thanks!
Ok, that out of the way, I wanted to discuss the idea that the Red Sox are rebuilding. The Boston Globe and Alex Speier, the best Red Sox writer on the planet in my most humble of opinions, had a piece on just that topic in the Globe’s baseball preview section. Alex makes a compelling case, as he always does, and I certainly won’t argue he’s wrong. I do think there is a distinction here though. Bad teams rebuild. Good teams build. Always. Teams like the Dodgers and Rays are always building. To paraphrase Glengarry Glen Ross, always be building. That building can take different forms. For the Dodgers, it meant bolstering their rotation with Trevor Bauer on a big money short year deal. For the Rays, it meant trading Blake Snell to San Diego for a group of prospects, including Luis Patino, a top-25 prospect and the guy Tampa expects to step in for Snell.
The Red Sox aren’t seated in a Dodgers-like throne, nor do they need to operate like the Rays. They’re somewhere in the middle right now, and that somewhere means bringing in relatively low money guys who can help now, but maybe also long term. Those are guys like Kike Hernandez, Hunter Renfroe, Nick Pivetta, Garrett Whitlock, and Garrett Richards. Each of those guys could be on the team four years from now, or off the team four months from now. Each of those guys is under team control for at least two seasons and in some cases more, but only Hernandez is signed beyond 2021, and he’s only got one year beyond. This is the infamous flexibility we’ve heard so much about.
The Dodgers were able to bring in Mookie Betts and Bauer in consecutive off-seasons because they have the farm system to allow it. Their farm system gave them the prospects to trade to Boston for Betts, and the fact that they were paying Max Muncy, Cody Bellinger, and Walker Buehler the league minimum salary at the time meant they had space for Betts in his last arbitration year on their payroll, and then when he agreed to a big money contract. Last year, Hyun-Jin Ryu and Rich Hill came off the books, and they were able to replace them with Dustin May and Julio Urias. The money they saved went to Bauer and, well, you see how this works. It’s not rocket science.
The Rays are playing a similar game, but with a much lower payroll, which is why Snell was shipped out, why Longoria went years before him, and why if Wander Franco is anywhere near as good as people expect, he’ll spend the majority of his career playing for a different team. But, the prospects he brings back in the inevitable trade that sends him elsewhere will sustain the Rays in multiple ways for years.
This Red Sox team is following a similar path. Betts is gone. Benintendi is gone. Price is gone. Bradley is gone. And you can start to see why. Benintendi disappointed for two years, but was still able to bring back four players in return. The Red Sox got years, prospects, and a smaller salary, similar to what they received when they shipped out Betts and Price.
Finding long term pieces, or finding short term pieces that can be shipped out for long term value are the two orders of the day. Sometimes that means cycling through guys to do it, sometimes over months, sometimes over years. If they can do all that while putting a competitive team on the field, then they did their jobs, or so my theory goes.
If you accept the financial constraints the team has placed on itself as binding, then things make sense. And then there’s every reason to feel like this team is building towards something. There is some talent on the farm, and for the first time in a few years there are some intriguing players close to the majors, close enough to impact the team this season. That’s a step in the right direction. Connor Seabold and Tanner Houck could be middle to back end starters. Garrett Whitlock could be a reliever or even a starter. Bobby Dalbec, Jarren Duran, and Jeter Downs can be major league starters for multiple seasons. That’s a lot of potential starters for not a lot of potential money.
The part of this that worries me is the Red Sox don’t have the minor league depth to pull off the Dodgers model, at least not right now. Building that takes years, tons of skill, and, frankly, luck. I have no idea, no inside knowledge, on whether or not the Red Sox can conquer player development the way the Dodgers have. But even if they can, it won’t happen over night. Picking fourth in the upcoming draft will help, but it’s not a panacea. Still, this is part of why guys like Benintendi have been traded. Building up the strength of the minor league system is the key to making this kind of constant building, this kind of constant roster churning, work.
That’s how you build a winner now. It’s not like the 2018 Red Sox, where you put a core together, hold them together as long as you can while they get older and more expensive, and then, when they suffer the inevitable downturn, the team has to go through a down cycle to replenish. Now, the rotating through players allows teams to keep winning, as long as the supply of young and cheap talent doesn’t run out.
Theo Epstein, when he took over the Red Sox back in 2003, famously declared he was going to build a player development machine. Well, almost 20 years later, that’s what Chaim Bloom is here to do. We’ll see if he’s successful.
Happy Opening Day, take two, Sox Outsider readers! Thanks for reading. If you enjoy the newsletter, tell a friend. Pass it on to a loved one. And thank you. I appreciate it.