Red Sox fire Chaim Bloom

Now, I know the answer to this, but I'll ask the group just to stir the pot.


Any chance Theo being seen and pictured in Boston riding the T means he was here to sneek in the back door to sack Chaim and take his job back Viking style?

I've been checked out for a while and switched to football lightning fast, but I don't think Bloom deserved this. I'm generally meh on him but I feel like he got a lot of unwarranted and misguided criticism on here.

Unless he was the reason why we haven't sold and tanked around the deadline the past few years like we should have in which case he should have been canned and rehired just to be canned again.

I expect Cora to manage next year too. Mets?

This seems like a hysterical reaction, if you’ll indulge an antiquated and gendered term. The brief when he was hired was a sustainable contender. Before each of the last two years, he said the team would be good. Spoiler: they were not. Now maybe they are having a chuckle behind the scenes, but if he is genuine, that is a disastrous miscalculation. They are currently in last. So it is possible they’ll be in last 3/4 years.

Even I, who think Bloom pretty much sucked overall, think this is shocking. But “chaotic”? Do people around baseball think being a bad team is something a GM can survive in Boston for long? How is this more “chaotic” than firing DD one year out of the best season in team history?

My guess is people know full well the stakes in Boston are very, very high.

Many things led to this. One of them is shown on this page: The Red Sox were not allowed to sign normal IFAs in 2016-17. and had their top five signings from the previous year voided.

Another is that their great-looking $3M top sign the next year, Daniel Flores, suddenly took sick and died.

Those years should have produced 1-4 people the same age as or just older than Bello and Rafaela.

Chaim actually got Wilyer Abreu, who was planning to sign with the Sox in 2016-17 before the punishment came down.

www.soxprospects.com/international21.htm#2017

I said at the begining of this season, that begining the year without a solid "SS" was a fire able offense, but as the season went on I thought Chaim had a very good year. So I changed my mind, now I don't know how I should feel. I'm kind of Agnostic about it.

This is the hard part. Theo is too big for this job now and Andrew Friedman just signed an extension in 2022. So who else out there takes you to greatness?

Oh, and whomever it is, he walked into a stocked farm, so almost like getting to be CEO of a company that has an average product but the equivalent of all of Apple's cash on hand.

I think overall Bloom didn’t make many mistakes and took limited risk. It’s like running a fund, you can avoid risk and make limited returns and eventually you’re going to get fired.

One question is whether people internally felt like he wasn’t a good executive. Clearly has a great analytical mind but perhaps they viewed him as indecisive with trades/signings. Part of running any organization is making bold decisions along the way.

Looking at his big signings, there aren’t any real disasters, but not looking great early on.

Yoshida - solid but not a great fit on the team given their defensive woes (would be a better signing in different context)
Story - defense provides a floor, but his offensive trajectory going into his contract was mostly downward similar to Sandoval (declining OPS over 5 years)
Kluber - took up payroll and was a disaster
Jansen - again solid, but a team with so many holes, $16M for a closer isn’t great

This still doesn’t solve our organizational issue of not being able to acquire/develop pitching…

As some are, I am certainly torn on the widsom or necessity of this move (so much of how Bloom operated as Pres of Baseball Ops was outside of public view, for good or ill).

I will say that for all the concern about ownership scaring away candidates because of this, I really don't think it'll be a big deal. To paraphrase a point from Ryen Russillo about NFL teams and GM's, there are only 30 of these jobs in baseball. If I'm someone ambitious who wants to run a team, and the Red Sox call me, I pick up the phone. Having erratic and overbearing billionaires as my bosses is just part of the package almost no matter where you go.