Red Sox fans will have limited patience for a roster rebuild

BOSTON --- The season’s first 24 games rather strongly suggest the Red Sox are not a championship contender at the moment.

Boston’s pitching staff is historically bad. Its lineup, offensively and defensively, has multiple holes. Extended absences for Chris Sale (left elbow), Eduardo Rodriguez (myocarditis) and Darwinzon Hernandez (COVID-19) have stripped the club’s already thin pitching ranks.

And it could get worse. The trade deadline looms less than [...]

BOSTON --- The season’s first 24 games rather strongly suggest the Red Sox are not a championship contender at the moment.

Boston’s pitching staff is historically bad. Its lineup, offensively and defensively, has multiple holes. Extended absences for Chris Sale (left elbow), Eduardo Rodriguez (myocarditis) and Darwinzon Hernandez (COVID-19) have stripped the club’s already thin pitching ranks.

And it could get worse. The trade deadline looms less than two weeks from Tuesday’s 13-6 loss to the Phillies, and there has never been a more ideal time for the Red Sox to conduct a fire sale. Chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom would certainly seem authorized to preside over a roster teardown after already trading Mookie Betts and David Price in February.

“I don’t know how you shake things up,” Red Sox manager Ron Roenicke said. “I don’t know what you do there. We still like what we have. We still like our club.”

It’s a noble attempt from Roenicke to keep Boston’s players in even passably decent spirits. He seems to be a genuinely nice man who has been thrust into a brutal situation. But selling such an endeavor to the likes of Xander Bogaerts and J.D. Martinez – key cogs in a 108-win machine just two short years ago – would seem rather difficult.

“We’re not giving up,” said Bogaerts, who appeared more crestfallen than at any point in recent memory. “We’ve just got to come back tomorrow with the same positive mentality that we had today.”

Think of the circumstances. We’re in the midst of a pandemic, and attention is rightly turned elsewhere. Sporting results are correctly minimized. There are no fans at Fenway Park to voice their displeasure, and financial shortfalls at the gate due to the virus – not from folks refusing to watch a subpar product – are already ensured.

John Smoltz and Ken Rosenthal have spent the last two innings talking about how the #RedSox are on the verge of a teardown/rebuild.

Chaim Bloom was already allowed to trade Mookie Betts. Nothing should be a surprise at this point. But how long will you wait for a contender?

— Bill Koch (@BillKoch25) August 16, 2020

What are those distracted, absent Boston patrons thinking? A small sample from a weekend Twitter poll provides a bit of a glimpse. Of the 871 votes cast, the two most common answers of the four offered suggest limited patience for a rebuilding project.

According to 35.8% of respondents, Bloom has until 2022 to put Boston back in contention. Nearly three in 10 voters, 29.7%, said the Red Sox should be vying for the postseason every year regardless of circumstances. The 2021 season was preferred by 14.6% and 2023 won out for 19.9%.

Bloom carried out a clear mandate from ownership to reset the Competitive Balance Tax penalties. He inherited a farm system ranked in the sport’s bottom 10 by Baseball America. But this is still Boston, one of the baseball’s most demanding markets, and this losing won’t be tolerated for long regardless of those realities.

Using the draft to reload won’t be as simple after just four picks this year and 20 selections next year – the Red Sox would normally enjoy 80 during a two-year span. Spending their way out of trouble also doesn’t appear to be an option for a club with Sale, Dustin Pedroia, Nathan Eovaldi and $16 million of Price’s salary on its books in 2021.

There’s a way to make sense of all this on paper. You can certainly argue in a vacuum for a reset to increase flexibility both on the 40-man roster and on the open market. Former president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski saddled Boston with several bloated contracts – deals, it must be noted, that were ultimately approved by principal owner John Henry.

But baseball is a game played by humans, not on a spreadsheet. That this appears to be taking a visible toll on Bogaerts, the club’s de facto captain, is a bit disconcerting. You can only wonder what the other members of the roster – the minority of them homegrown stars, the majority of them less sunny on their best days – are thinking about the coming months or years.

September could be more brutal than August. That doesn’t seem possible, but it is. There’s no guarantee the Red Sox will rebound in 2021 if Bloom opts to build his prospect base instead of the big league ranks.

Two years removed from arguably the greatest team in their history, Boston appears helpless.

bkoch@providencejournal.com

(401) 277-7054

On Twitter: @BillKoch25