How Chaim Bloom plans to approach the trade deadline for Red Sox
"There’s a lot of different things we’re going to have conversations about."
The Red Sox shipped veteran Kiké Hernandez to the Dodgers on Tuesday evening, but such a deal doesn’t decisively signal that Boston plans to be buyers or sellers at the trade deadline.
The Hernandez deal was more a necessity as the result of a roster crunch, and Chaim Bloom still has a week to gauge whether or not this team is worth investing in ahead of the Aug. 1 deadline.
Entering Tuesday night six games over .500 and 2.5 games behind Toronto in the Wild Card race, many MLB insiders expect Boston to add over the coming days, especially when it comes to starting pitching.
But as he mulls his options, Bloom said on Tuesday at Fenway Park that his priority is to further cultivate a young core that has bloomed this year with players like Jarren Duran, Brayan Bello, and Triston Casas.
“There’s a lot of different things we’re going to have conversations about,” Bloom said, as transcribed by NESN.com’s Tim Crowley. “I hope that it has become more visible, especially in the past several weeks, that a lot of what we’ve been talking about with trying to have a core that wins, not just now, but can keep winning. A lot of that is starting to be more visible by the day. You just need to look at a scoreboard to see we’re not where we want to be yet.”
If Bloom was looking to add, a focus on pitching stands as an obvious area of improvement. Even though Boston could see both Chris Sale and Garrett Whitlock return to the rotation in the coming weeks, neither pitcher is exactly known for durability.
And with Alex Cora regularly taxing his bullpen with extended reps over the last few weeks, Boston desperately needs more arms to eat up innings over the final two months of the season.
“I think this is an area where there is no such thing as having enough,” Bloom said of adding pitching. “We’re going to be looking at a lot of different possibilities. Where it goes from here, I don’t know.”
However, Bloom and the Red Sox are looking to build a consistent and sustainable contender over the coming years. As such, Boston is ideally looking to acquire players with term who can slot in as building blocks for both the 2023 season and beyond.
Boston likely doesn’t have the same urgency as other clubs when it comes to perusing the market for rentals.
“Those are going to be the most attractive opportunities for us,” Bloom said of players with team control beyond 2023. “That’s going to be a lens we look through at anything we can do. We want to make this group as strong as we can. If we can add more core contributors, that’s something we’d love to do.”
Setting one’s sights on those trade chips also comes at a cost. Team control also raises the asking price of players dangled out ahead of the deadline.
And even though Boston’s prospect pipeline is the best it’s been in years, Bloom ideally doesn’t want to start unraveling a farm system that’s begun to flourish.
“We’re going to stay involved on every front because you never know where you find good deals,” Bloom said. “There’s always deals that can fit whether rentals or long-term guys.”
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