It wasn’t the best of times, it was the worst of times. For the Red Sox, at least. Three last place finishes in four years, yet another front office change and the ownership group that brought four world championships to Boston after an eighty year drought has been reduced to hiding from their fans when they’re not gaslighting and calling them liars. If that’s not rock bottom, I don’t want to know what is.

How did it come to this?

There’s no single answer obviously. Part of it is undoubtedly the fact that baseball is not the portfolio from Henry and co anymore, just a part of it. The origin point for the Fenway Sports Group branding it might be, but these days the Red Sox are merely a division of a conglomerate trying to run baseball, golf, hockey, racing and soccer clubs simultaneously on multiple continents. If you’re overseeing one business, and then you buy several more, your attention will be divided – time is zero sum. While ownership hotly disputes any notion that this could be the case – see the aforementioned liar comments, the return of Theo the Wunderkind belies those protests. As does the reporting.

It’s also worth mentioning that the Red Sox picked an exceptionally poor time to lose focus. Their division is arguably the best in the history of the sport at present. The Yankees continue to spend, if not always wisely. The Blue Jays, for their part, were willing to match the bananas but easily economically justifiable $700M outlay for Ohtani. The Orioles, meanwhile, are finally reaping the rewards of tanking for years, with a farm system that has had the consensus top prospect in baseball for three consecutive years – none of whom was the same prospect. Oh, and their new owners appear to also be willing to spend. And the Rays can roll out of bed and win 90 games. Much as I long for the time, then, when the Orioles and Rays remembered they were the Orioles and Rays, the days when the Sox only had to worry about the Yankees are over.

Still, from this vantage point, the reason the Sox are where they are and are doing what they’re doing isn’t complicated: it’s the pitching, stupid.

It’s a cliché at this point to say that the Red Sox can’t develop pitching. But that’s because it’s true. As laid out in truly exceptional detail here this is part of a deliberate strategy on the Red Sox part which has seen them invest less than basically every other club in drafting pitching. If you don’t draft and develop talent, then, you have to buy talent.

Unfortunately the Red Sox are owned by a man who is famously skeptical of investing in pitching – just ask Jon Lester. This isn’t an entirely unreasonable position on his part, to be fair. Mookie Betts was shipped out of town in part because they owed a broken David Price $96M and paid almost $140M to Chris Sale for roughly a season and a half worth of starts. Eovaldi’s contract wasn’t a disaster, but he crossed the 140 IP threshold once in five years with the club. For an owner with a background in institutional investing, these have not been good investments.

So when you don’t want to pay for pitching, and you’re not investing draft resources, you have to hope for some miracles from your development team. Those miracles never arrived.

There were small, obvious failures of our development staff. Brasier was useless with us, released, picked up by the Dodgers and immediately transformed into an asset. Same with Diekman, except with Tampa instead – who’d already done the exact same thing when they pilfered a legitimate starting pitcher in Springs from the Sox in return for a catcher who can’t catch and a AAA utility guy. The class of pitchers at Worcester in recent years, for its part, that was expected to provide depth and potentially back end starters, did neither. Seybold had one good year in the minors, never recovered and is gone. Murphy had his moments last year, but is essentially a long man. Walter might not even be that. Drohan, meanwhile, was deliberately sacrificed in the Rule 5 draft. If even one or two of these had turned into #5 starters, maybe we don’t have the Barraclough game. And maybe Bloom still has his job.

It’s interesting, as an aside, to hear the likes of Ken Rosenthal essentially equate Bloom with Breslow when asking why the latter has the former’s job. Why was Bloom fired? Much as I appreciated some of the work he did and appreciated the fact that he was set up to fail by ownership, the answer, of course, is that it’s the pitching, stupid.

To recap, then:

1. The organization has finished in last place three of the last four years (though 2021 was sweet)
2. The organization is projected to finish in last place again
3. The organization hasn’t drafted enough pitching for at least five years
4. The organization is unwilling to buy pitching on the open market
5. The organization, therefore, doesn’t have enough pitching

On the eve of pitchers and catchers reporting, then, am I out?

I’m not. While I don’t expect immediate returns, the new head of the Red Sox front office has a proven track record of developing pitching with the Cubs. Their new pitching coach has a proven track record of developing talent with the Giants. Their new Director of Pitching has a track record of developing talent with the Twins. And their new pitching advisor has a track record of developing talent for a host of major league players.

Unlike Rosenthal, then, I see this as a substantial improvement from Bloom’s front office.

The returns, of course, are far more likely to be long term. Maybe Bailey can turn two of Crawford, Houck and Whitlock into legitimate starters, but more likely they are what they are at this point – multi-inning relievers or high end one inning guys. Maybe Boddy and Willard can coax more velocity out of Walter and better command out of Murphy, but again, the most likely outcome is improvements at the margins. None of these players is Yamamoto, or even Montgomery for that matter.

Which means that the outlook for the season ahead is bleak, and I haven’t even gotten into the Alex Cora situation which neither he nor the front office wants to be a distraction but can’t be anything but that.

The rebuild begun by Bloom in 2020 has not gone according to plan. Some of that is on him. Some of that was due to draft penalties handed to him but incurred by the prior administration. Some of that was due to an unprecedented global pandemic. And some of it is due to bad luck. The best thing the owners could do would be to own this, and candidly acknowledge that we’re not there yet. But that’s not in them, and instead they want to sell us platitudes about the “Fenway Experience” even as they continue to ratchet up ticket prices.

Miserable as the last few years have been, though, there’s also a lot to watch this season. How do the big three prospects perform right down the road from me in Portland? How does our revamped pitching development machine impact players up and down the org? How do young players like Bello, Casas and Grissom develop? Can Cora get them to win slightly more than they lose and have an outside shot at one of the gratuitous surplus of playoff spots?

Ok, probably not on that last one, but you get the point. There is reason to hope. Not for this season, in all likelihood, but it’s possible, if you squint, to see a path back to better days. Even if it’s in spite of the owners, not because of them as it was once upon a time.

Even if there wasn’t, honestly, my parents raised me to be a Red Sox fan, as did their parents before them. I will do the same with my daughter. I’ve experienced highs with this club that my grandfather never got to experience. So while I might not be paying NESN thirty bucks a month to watch the team roll the same pitching staff out to get shelled, there’s still nothing like listening to a ballgame outside on a hot summer day.

Call me crazy, then, but in spite of what has been by a wide margin the worst offseason in memory, I am excited for pitchers and catchers.

Onward and, eventually, upward.