Chaim Bloom and the Red Sox front office failed spectacularly trying to keep Xander Bogaerts in Boston, and Bloom’s recent comments only make it worse.
Considering how humiliating the drop in the Boston Red Sox offer to Xander Bogaerts before the 2022 season was, there was always a sense of unease about a quick action team’s access to free agency this season and the team’s ability to re-sign a homegrown star. These concerns are fully established.
Bogaerts signed a wild 11-year, $280 million contract with the Padres late Wednesday night, thus leaving General Manager Chaim Bloom with another red X on his resume as the shortstop joins a growing list of stars that could have been Red Sox For life they are now playing elsewhere because the team will not pay them.
As if that wasn’t frustrating enough, though, there was still some hope that Boston would be able to keep the Bogaerts as the Padres’ top signing. But when asked about the deal, Bloom made himself look even worse.
Red Sox: Chaim Bloom admits Boston has always been losing to Xander Bogart
When Bloom spoke about the Red Sox’s drive to keep Bogaerts, he basically asserted that Boston had no chance and that reports of optimism about negotiations were unfounded because the front office never expected to be able to meet the price of the shortstop.
On the one hand, you can certainly look at this as a subtle bloom in that the team shouldn’t give Bogaerts an 11-year contract for the $280 million they’d pay him until he’s 41. It may also be true that Bloom and the front office would never have had to do that if they simply correctly valued the deadlock in negotiations before he opted out and reached free agency.
It’s crazy for Red Sox fans to hear this speech from the general manager of one of the richest teams in baseball. Bloom, a Tampa Bay Rays student, is a CEO who doesn’t have the money to spend when it’s just plain wrong. And he does it at the expense of the local stars and makes the team better.
So for him to say outright that the team never had a chance to keep Bogaerts is a damning indictment of himself and how he handled the whole situation.
Now all eyes will turn to two objects. First, Boston needs to replace Bogaerts, though their unwillingness to spend makes it unlikely that they could do so adequately remotely by signing other expensive free agents like Carlos Correa or Dansby Swanson. Secondly, though, they need to sign Rafael Devers on stretch, another homegrown star.
Because if this pattern continues with Bloom and Devers is the next such player to lose, there could be riots out of Fenway Park.
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