Red Sox and Padres fans were in a frenzy when the Xander Bogaerts deal was reported during the Major League Baseball winter meetings right at the stroke of midnight on the east coast.
San Diego officially introduced its new shortstop Friday, and Boston thanked the 30-year-old for everything he did for the team. Chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom now will have to decide how the Red Sox will adjust without Bogaerts with decisions in free agency or internally at his disposal.
Bloom sat down with Chris Cotillo of MassLive at the winter meetings, and he revealed what the sentiment was internally on Bogaerts’ future in Boston.
“It got to a point to we just weren’t going to get to,” Bloom told Cotillo in a piece published Saturday. “That’s not to say that, emotionally, it wasn’t hard, but I don’t think there’s any sense in beating around the bush on that. The endpoint speaks for itself. We just weren’t going to get there.”
The Red Sox signed reliever Chris Martin and agreed to deals with Kenley Jansen and Masataka Yoshida during the week of the winter meetings, and there likely are more deals to be made to prepare Boston for the 2023 season. Of course, replacing Bogaerts is a tall task for any organization, and it’s something Bloom understood well.
“It’s really hard and it’s really important (to draw a line somewhere),” Bloom said. “I also fundamentally believe that building around homegrown talent is also something that’s really important to the organization. A lot of those things go beyond anything you can put on paper. They go beyond numbers or production so there’s a lot of different things to balance there. But we do ultimately have to make sound business and baseball decisions. Sometimes that perfectly aligns with where your heart is and sometimes it doesn’t.
“He’s a really important person to everyone here and he’s important to the organization. From that standpoint, the fact he’s not going to be here anymore is hard. And that’s sad. I think anybody who sugarcoats that is being dishonest. Just because there are business decisions everyone has to make doesn’t mean that the emotional side or the personal side is any less.”
On the topic of Bogaerts being the team’s top priority in free agency, Bloom added: “We wouldn’t have said that if we didn’t mean it. I think it became clear to us as things went on that this was going to go to a point that we just weren’t, irrespective of how we prioritize things, it just wasn’t something that we should do. It’s hard because of how much we love him. But it’s just the reality of the situation.”
That emotional side of the game was felt when Alex Cora, Rafael Devers and Kiké Hernández bid farewell to Bogaerts on social media. The Red Sox finished last in the American League East last season and will hope to improve in 2023, and Bloom is prepared for the pressure that comes with those expectations.
“What happened here is not super uncommon in our game, especially today,” Bloom said. “It’s not something that should be totally unexpected. But given how he felt about the Red Sox and how everybody here felt about him, I totally get why people are asking those questions.”
