Trade Deadline and Post-Trade Deadline

It ain't great, folks

Photo by Osman Rana on Unsplash

I was going to write a piece covering each of the trades made around the trade deadline, and this will kinda be that, but I think there’s actually more to talk about than just which guys got moved and for whom.

As I’m sure you know, the Red Sox made a number of trades. I will summarize them here.

1. The Red Sox traded Christian Vazquez to the Houston Astros for two prospects, outfielder Wilyer Abreu and infielder (?) Enmanual Valdez.

2. The Red Sox traded reliever Jake Diekman to the Chicago White Sox for catcher Reese McGuire.

3. The Red Sox traded a player to be named later to Cincinnati for outfielder Tommy Pham.

4. The Red Sox traded minor league starting pitcher and former first round pick Jay Groome to San Diego for Eric Hosmer, $44 million (the money remaining on Hosmer’s contract minus the league minimum), and two prospects, infielder Max Ferguson and outfielder Corey Rosier.

So, let’s sum up. They dumped Christian Vazquez for prospects, dumped Diekman and the year left on his contract on the White Sox and got McGuire back, who (theoretically) fills Vazquez’s spot, and added Pham and Hosmer to supplement the current roster.

Oh, and they also:

6. Designated Jackie Bradley, Jr. for assignment.

That’s a lot.

And yet… is it?

And I think that’s sort of the problem. Chaim Bloom talked before the deadline about potentially buying and selling, and that’s clearly what he did. They downgraded at catcher to upgrade the farm system, they got rid of Diekman’s 2023 money, and they added a first baseman and corner outfielder, both arguably better than any that existed on the roster prior to those deals.

Each of those moves is defensible in a vacuum. If they weren’t going to keep Vazquez and they valued the prospects Houston offered a lot, then that makes sense. If you don’t have Vazquez then you need a catcher and while McGuire isn’t actually good, he was available and they clearly didn’t want Diekman anymore so subtracting him and adding McGuire was two positives in one move. And Pham and Hosmer were effectively free and both fit needs on the roster, so hard to argue.

Buying and selling simultaneously makes sense in the abstract, but in practice two half measures don’t equal a whole. It doesn’t make sense to trade one important guy and hurt the roster, but keep the others because you don’t want to hurt the roster by dealing them. You just end up with a lesser roster, one less likely to win. Perhaps that could even work from the top of the standings. If the Red Sox were 10 games up in the division perhaps you could make a move like that because you have those 10 games in the standings to play with. But the Red Sox didn’t have those games. To make the playoffs they need to make up games on the teams in front of them, and so a step back, any step back, is very harmful to their chances.

Maybe that’s why trading Vazquez feels like cutting the team’s feet out from underneath them. Maybe Valdez and Abreu will turn into future stars or even rosterable players. The epitaph for that deal hasn’t been written yet. It may yet be a positive for the Red Sox but, I’ll say this, it’s didn’t begin in positive territory. The deal was painful for the team, clearly. It hurt them in the clubhouse, something Xander Bogaerts voiced shortly afterwards. Hearing your star shortstop who can be a pending free agent question a trade so publicly can’t be a good thing.

Yes they added Pham and Hosmer, but neither are particularly good players at this point in their careers. Hosmer’s defense at first base had deteriorated badly. He’s a 32 year old first baseman with an almost 60 percent ground ball rate and horrendous foot speed. This is not a desirable combination. Pham is sporting a .700 OPS over the past three seasons. That’s seven percent below league average. He’s useful (he can run and he’ll take a walk) but don’t confuse that for actually being good. The best that can be said of both is that they were effectively free to acquire.

Since the trade deadline things haven’t gotten better. The Red Sox are 3-5 bringing their record to 54-56, five games out of the last Wild Card spot. Five games doesn’t sound like much, but to get there the Red Sox will have to leapfrog Baltimore, the White Sox, Cleveland, and one of Seattle or Tampa. It’s not impossible, but it sure as heck isn’t likely.

None of these trades do anything to quell the uncertainty the Red Sox face this off-season when they stand to lose a lot of players to free agency. The key to this is Rafael Devers, a budding star at 25 years old. They’ll have one more season of him and essentially one more off-season to attempt to sign him to an extension or trade him. Everyone just assumes Devers will stay if the right number is offered to him, and maybe that’s true. But maybe it isn’t. Devers came up in this organization but he’s not from Boston. He didn’t grow up a Red Sox fan. It’s not in his blood. Not yet. Put yourself in his shoes and look around at the organization. Is this one you want to sign up to be a part of for the next eight-to-10 years?

The Nationals have been justifiably crushed for trading Juan Soto but there’s a reason they did it when they did. They got a massive haul of prospects in return. Devers isn’t Soto, but even if he was, with only one more year of team control, if they can’t extend Devers, the Red Sox are looking at another Mookie Betts trade.

At that point, winning in 2023 is going to be extremely difficult.

Even if they manage to keep Devers, there will be a big shopping list for the Red Sox this off-season. If you’re a Bloom believer, and I still count myself among those, there will be ample space for the Red Sox GM to stretch his legs and acquire the roster he wants.

For now though, it seems this team will tread water through the rest of the season, and then lose three of its star players and potentially a fourth. That’s not written in stone. There are still injured players who could return and make a big difference. The guys in the lineup could play better than they have. There could be a run in this team yet. But if things continue as they are, there are two Monday morning quarterback ways of looking at it. Either the team was damaged by trading Vazquez, further shrinking to nothing the already small margin for error they had. Or, the team wasn’t going to compete regardless and they erred by not trading other players who they will now get nothing for. Neither is probably particularly fair, but since the Red Sox didn’t pick a direction to go they’ve opened themselves up to getting it from either side.

It was a rough spot Bloom was in with an injured roster and one that projects to lose a lot to free agency this off-season. He clearly tried to address both those needs, the need to compete and the need to build the organization for the future at the same time, at once. Time will better tell whether he accomplished either goal, but if the team doesn’t win this year and loses Devers and Bogaerts in the off-season, does it even matter?