Red Sox president and CEO Sam Kennedy totally understands the backlash over Boston standing pat at the 2019 Major League Baseball trade deadline.
But there’s a method to the organization’s madness.
Kennedy opened up about the Red Sox’s trade deadline approach Thursday on WEEI’s “The Greg Hill Show,” explaining that Boston considered several options but ultimately didn’t pull the trigger on any moves because the long-term risks outweighed the potential short-term rewards.
“There was a desire to try and do something (Wednesday). But the fundamental issue in baseball — and every club faces it — is the inherent short-term and long-term conflict,” Kennedy said, as transcribed by WEEI.com. “But at the end of the day, we were not willing to part with some pieces that we think are long-term pieces of the Red Sox.
“My job is to ensure we have the revenues, the resources and the right people in the right positions making the decisions and that we can be competitive not just in 2019, but 2020, 2021, 2022, and so on and so forth. That’s really the hardest part of the job, when you have to make decisions not just with the ‘let’s win tonight’ mentality, but what does this move potentially do to this club in 2020, 2021, 2022?
“You look at some of the players on the field — Rafael Devers, Xander Bogaerts, Jackie Bradley Jr., Andrew Benintendi — all of those guys were parts of proposals that we’ve received in past years. Kudos to our whole baseball operations management — going all the way back to the Theo Epstein days and Ben Cherington and Mike Hazen and now Dave Dombrowski — for holding onto a lot of the core assets that have allowed us to win four World Series championships in Boston. But when you get to the deadline day, and it’s as quiet as it was, I totally recognize it can be disappointing.”
Kennedy acknowledged there being some discussions about moving major league players — “rattling cages and shifting things around,” as he put it — but again, the deals simply didn’t make sense for the Red Sox, who entered Thursday 10 games behind the New York Yankees in the American League East and 2 1/2 games back of the AL’s second wild-card spot.
Boston thus will ride with its roster as constructed, for better or worse.
