back on a one-year deal for some depth, but had to demote him to relief in mid-May. Bello and Crawford have been bright spots, but those two guys aren’t a contending rotation, and I don’t think it was reasonable for the Red Sox to think that group of seven starters was going to produce above-average work for them.
How did they get to that point? Bloom’s predecessor, Dave Dombrowski, brought the team a World Championship in 2018, but the process strip-mined a lot of the long-term pitching and saddled the club with some bad contracts. The trade for Chris Sale worked in the short term, but the decision to sign him to a five-year extension in March 2019 has been a fiasco, as he blew out his elbow that same year and has thrown just 135 innings since the extension kicked in for 2020, with one year and $27.
, who also had Tommy John after the trade but has pitched more and more effectively than Sale since both returned to the mound in 2021.Bloom inherited a roster with one healthy, effective starter under contract in 2020, Nate Eovaldi, who actually was pretty bad in 2019 but gave the team 7 WAR over the next three years of his contract before leaving as a free agent.