These Red Sox seem on a bridge to nowhere

BOSTON --- This isn’t even a bridge year at the moment.

This is the Red Sox moving further away from the on-field culture they built while rolling to a World Series championship just two short years ago.

Attention to detail was the norm as Boston set a new franchise record with 108 victories. Wednesday night saw more difficulties on defense, base runners thrown out while facing a six-run deficit and the Rays taking a perverse pleasure in the spanking they dished out. [...]

BOSTON --- This isn’t even a bridge year at the moment.

This is the Red Sox moving further away from the on-field culture they built while rolling to a World Series championship just two short years ago.

Attention to detail was the norm as Boston set a new franchise record with 108 victories. Wednesday night saw more difficulties on defense, base runners thrown out while facing a six-run deficit and the Rays taking a perverse pleasure in the spanking they dished out.

Every Tampa Bay run or defensive gem in the field in this 9-5 victory was greeted with dugout cheers that could be heard throughout an empty Fenway Park. The Rays are certainly the more confident and complete team in this series, as they’ve shown through the first three nights. Kyle Hart makes his Red Sox debut Thursday afternoon attempting to avoid a 13th home loss to Tampa Bay in Boston’s last 14 tries.

Michael Chavis had one ball clank off his glove at first base and another finish stuck in the webbing, costing him a chance to make a throw to the plate. Kevin Pillar lost a fly ball in the twilight in right field and was thrown out at second attempting to stretch one of his four singles into a double. It’s generally difficult to take any shine off a 4-for-5 evening at the plate, but those two situations might have done the trick.

We’re now reaching beyond what Boston might do over the course of just these two months. The Red Sox are 6-12 and would require a week-long run of victories to reach .500 again. That’s not going to happen with Boston’s dismal array of starting pitchers posting a combined 6.01 earned-run average through 18 games.

This isn’t development. This is the Red Sox trading their best player in spring training as a means to balance the financial books and entering a season – whether it was 60 games or 162 – with a severely flawed roster. What you’ve seen thus far, with Mookie Betts a member of the Dodgers and annually bound for October, is the result.

It would be somewhat defensible if Boston was doing this with a collection of talented prospects just taking their licks. That certainly worked for Atlanta in the 1990s, Oakland in the 2000s and Houston in the 2010s. But most of the guilty parties here are veteran castoffs doubling as lottery tickets, and Red Sox chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom would have a negative balance in his current gambling account.

That we even have to ask whether or not service time manipulation plays into Boston not promoting some of its top organizational talent tells you even more. The Red Sox are setting the stage for younger, cheaper, more flexible rosters in 2021 and 2022. They’re buying time in the midst of a pandemic where attention is rightly turned elsewhere and 36,000 disgruntled fans aren’t here every night to make their opinions known.

Boston is on pace to finish 20-40 this year and, over 162 games, would stagger to a 54-108 mark. That’s the reverse of the 108-54 bulldozer that hammered its way through 29 other franchises in 2018. The Red Sox are 90-90 in their last 180 games – an even .500 – and could well be on the way to something worse.

How does any veteran with a realistic alternative willingly endure this? That’s the real question now as this season unfolds. Xander Bogaerts and J.D. Martinez are among those who could opt out of their contracts over the next two seasons or decline to return as free agents, and most of those players have tasted success too often now to waste prime years of their respective careers with a rebuild.

Bogaerts, Martinez and their teammates are professionals, sure. They’ve long since crossed the threshold where the kid’s game becomes a job and a responsibility. But talent like theirs would be both handsomely compensated and welcome in far more places than Boston – places that aren’t staggering like this.

bkoch@providencejournal.com

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On Twitter: @BillKoch25