Chaim Bloom wasn’t hired to build a World Series contender overnight.
So, to point a finger at the Red Sox chief baseball officer would be a classic case of displaced anger.
That said, Bloom himself expected better immediate results from the club, which suffered its eighth consecutive loss Monday night at Yankee Stadium. As such, he’s not taking Boston’s 2020 struggles lightly.
“I’m not pleased. None of us are. This isn’t where anybody wants to be,” Bloom told The Boston Globe’s Peter Abraham on Sunday. “The organization is clear-eyed about what the task is in front of us. This isn’t a start anybody wanted to get off to.
“I think it’s possible to be really upset by the start while also not blowing it out of proportion. For me, that’s how everybody has handled it.”
Bloom’s first year in charge of Boston’s baseball operations department has been interesting, to say the least. There was the Mookie Betts trade. There was the sign-stealing investigation, which resulted in Alex Cora’s departure. There was the loss of Chris Sale to Tommy John surgery. And oh yeah, a global pandemic.
Now, there’s this: a 6-17 record to begin the season.
“In the course of your career, you’re around teams that are on top and teams that are going through tough times,” Bloom told Abraham. “Sometimes you learn a lot about people going through those tough times.”
Normally, there’d still be plenty of opportunities for the Red Sox to turn things around, as 23 games isn’t a huge sample size when it comes to a typical 162-game Major League Baseball campaign. This year’s 60-game sprint — a product of the COVID-19 outbreak — will make overcoming such a slow start nearly impossible, however. And that logic could be apparent in how Boston handles the Aug. 31 trade deadline.
“From Day 1 here, I felt like long-term sustainability needed to be a really important priority here. How we started, you have to weigh that in,” Bloom told Abraham. “We want to compete but we have to prioritize our big-picture goals.”
Suffering back-to-back four-game sweeps at the hands of two division rivals — the Tampa Bay Rays and New York Yankees — is a tough pill to swallow, no doubt, even in a season with tempered expectations.
Just don’t pin too much blame on Bloom at the moment. He, too, is frustrated by what he’s seen so far, and the (relatively) new guy remains committed to changing the narrative in due time.
