Will the Red Sox completely clean house this offseason?

The other side to "why not just keep Plawecki for 3 more weeks" is "why is cutting Plawecki 3 weeks before the season ends that harsh"

He was not coming back next year anyways, and wanting to see more of Wong and McGuire is perfectly reasonable. Cut him so he can find another team to finish the year with instead of doing nothing on the bench. I don't understand what the hoopla is all about.

To the point of the thread, there does seem to be a lot of chemistry in the clubhouse that has slowly been corroding away throughout this year. Some of these guys won a World Series together and most of them had a very fun ALCS run last year so I understand how they want to hold on to that and wanted the Front Office to keep the band together.

But on the other hand, Xander's comments at the trade deadline and the comments about Plawecki leaving are a little out of line. Player performance matters too, and someone who puts up negative value on the field not expect to keep their job for long.

Having a tight knit group is great but when that group is not good enough it's time to move on.

To me, you're picking between a well respected guy who has been part of the team for 3 years versus a guy who has been there for 3 minutes.

Both equally are useless to the current team and future, so I would DFA Almonte, but believe me, Kevin Plawecki isn't a hill I'd choose to die on.

Yu Chang keeps getting claimed on waivers and has put up about 1 WAR in 2/3rds of a season's worth of PA the last three years. I'd be surprised if they keep him on the 40 all offseason, but he'd be one of the best minor league free agents on the market. Convincing him to stick around would be of actual value to the organization.

I wasn’t really mad. Chang’s a known quantity.

I can’t tell if the blurb about the laundry cart is satire, or not, so I’m guessing it’s serious? Plawecki was pretty useful for a couple years but he was HORRENDOUS this year. The players always want things to go one way while failing to acknowledge that it’s a performance-based business and Plawecki simply didn’t perform. I’m actually amazed they kept him as long as they did.

Side note: I can’t believe they went over the tax by $4m with this awful team. Just mismanagement to the highest degree. Now they’ll get almost nothing when Xander leaves.

Is this what you read in the sports section of Huffington Post? Give me a break.

I've been sort of gathering my thoughts on this for a couple days, and here's where I stand right now.

-The move from Plawecki to German is a roster upgrade. That, in a vacuum, is good.
-The timing of the Plawecki/German move was kinda silly. The time to make that move was a month ago - German doesn't look any more ready than he did then, and Plawecki didn't look any more like toast. I guess to some extent Wong has given them a little bit more confidence that they could move on, but he's not really someone who has a different profile than he did at the beginning of the month either.
-If they wanted German on the roster (which, again, should've happened in August), there are other ways they could've gotten him there.
-Releasing Plawecki with two weeks to go is kind of crummy to Plawecki. I know it's a business and I'm sure Plawecki will tell you that, but it isn't great.
-Releasing Plawecki with other guys on the roster who also don't appear to be long-term or short-term solutions ruffled feathers in the clubhouse unnecessarily.
-HOWEVER, given the way they've played this season, not ruffling feathers in this particular underachieving clubhouse shouldn't be a top priority. They should've treated Plawecki better just for the sake of doing right by him, not because Bloom should be fearful of losing confidence in the locker room.
-A disconnect between management and the players is fine. Maybe it's even a positive on a team that underachieves. A disconnect between baseball ops and field management is a bigger problem, and I think that is starting to feel like a legitimate concern.

Going back to my initial point - when I say this move makes sense in a vacuum, I feel like that's a phrase I've used too many times since the start of the Bloom era. Too often, there are moves that are defensible on their own but sort of nonsensical as a team-building exercise. The Benintendi trade was fine, but where was the follow-up move? Same with the Renfroe trade last winter, a value-building deal that left a hole that wasn't filled? What was the strategy at this trading deadline, as they sold and bought at the same time while failing to get under the tax threshold? The time to make this move was a month ago. What's the benefit of doing it now? There's not enough time to get a look at German, there wasn't a roster crunch that necessitated dumping Plawecki, and the season is too far gone and too close to the end for it to make a difference in the standings.

Eovaldi had some more things to say yesterday:

“I love being here. It’s the front office, it’s the coaching staff, the training staff. Here, they all want to win. When you’re a player, that’s what you want to be a part of is an organization that’s going to do whatever it takes to win and put the best team out there to win ballgames.”

Honestly I don’t even think releasing Plawecki was a crappy thing to do to him- he gets paid the same amount of money and now he gets to go audition for a team where he may actually have a 2023 spot

Translation: "My agent called me, and..."

Or perhaps he has just genuinely enjoyed his time in Boston? He did win a WS here. If he genuinely does believe what he said in this interview, the question becomes would he perhaps give the Sox a home team discount? If so would the Red Sox even be interested? I am sure they would be at some price/year point but what is that point and is it close enough to get a deal done? Personally I kind of think it best for the Sox to move on outside of some big time home team discount for a max of 2 seasons.