Maybe the 2015 Major League Baseball winter meetings won’t be so eventful for the Boston Red Sox after all.
The Red Sox figured to be major players next week in Nashville as they construct their roster for the 2016 season. But with Boston already trading for a closer (Craig Kimbrel), signing a fourth outfielder (Chris Young) and reportedly agreeing to a monstrous contract with an ace (David Price), it sounds like president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski could be done with his heavy lifting this offseason.
“You can always get better. We’ll be open-minded going into the winter meetings,” Dombrowski said Wednesday on a conference call to announce Young’s two-year contract with the Red Sox. “We’ll see what happens over the next few days leading into that, but (we’ll) be in a position that I think our major moves are done. But when you go to the winter meetings, you can never tell what happens.”
Obviously, this doesn’t shut the door on moves. The Red Sox still could use some pieces, and sometimes the biggest transactions come from nowhere, hence Dombrowski’s open mind.
The Sox are in much better shape than they were for much of last season, though. Things are looking up for Boston despite the team’s last-place finish in 2015.
“I feel good about the roster as it is,” Dombrowski said. “When you look at the club, we’ve been able to address, from a positional player perspective, really our biggest need, looking for a fourth outfielder and a guy who can play quite a bit for us, in Chris’ case, with the three young guys we have (in the outfield).
“Knowing that our guys at this point are healthy and progressing well with Hanley (Ramirez) and Pablo (Sandoval), and also in Dustin (Pedroia)’s case, I think our positional players are basically set.”
Yes, you always can get better. And the Red Sox have to this point, which is why they’ll enter the winter meetings in the enviable position of being willing but not desperate.
Thumbnail photo via Twitter/@dyingquails
