No one can accuse the Boston Red Sox of operating with tunnel vision ahead of the 2021 Major League Baseball trade deadline.
Their performance so far this season suggests they’ll be buyers leading up to July 30, and while Boston has a few obvious needs, Red Sox chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom insisted Thursday on WEEI’s “The Greg Hill Show” he’s casting a wide net in his effort to improve the roster.
“We owe it to ourselves to have a lot of lines in the water right now,” Bloom said, as transcribed by WEEI.com. “Some guys are cleaner fits than others. But I’ve said this before, sometimes you can do yourself as much good by adding to a strength as you can by filling in what you look at as a weakness.
“There are a lot of different ways to win games. There’s attrition that happens over the course of the last few months of the season. We just have to make sure we have a lot of lines in the water and that we’re in-tune to all possibilities, and that’s what we’re doing right now. Constantly on the phone. Constantly going through the player pool. Just to make sure we’re in-tune with anything that might happen, any opportunity that might make sense for us.”
The Red Sox soon will have the luxury of welcoming back ace Chris Sale, who’s scheduled to make another rehab start Sunday at Double-A Portland while working toward a return from Tommy John surgery he underwent in March 2020.
They also just called up an exciting prospect, Jarren Duran, who could boost Boston’s outfield and therefore offer the club another internal reinforcement as it heads down the stretch.
But the Red Sox almost certainly will be active before next week’s trade deadline, with the starting rotation, the bullpen and first base among the areas Boston could look to upgrade. And it sounds like, based on Bloom’s comment, the organization is willing to think creatively while scouring the market.
