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Boston Red Sox: Understanding who’s running my team

By Bill Felber

BOSTON, MA - OCTOBER 28: From left, newly-hired chief baseball officer for the Boston Red Sox Chaim Bloom sits with fellow executives Sam Kennedy, Tom Werner and John Henry during an introductory press conference in the State Street Pavilion Club at Fenway Park in Boston on Oct. 28, 2019. (Photo by Jim Davis/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
BOSTON, MA - OCTOBER 28: From left, newly-hired chief baseball officer for the Boston Red Sox Chaim Bloom sits with fellow executives Sam Kennedy, Tom Werner and John Henry during an introductory press conference in the State Street Pavilion Club at Fenway Park in Boston on Oct. 28, 2019. (Photo by Jim Davis/The Boston Globe via Getty Images) /
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New Boston Red Sox President Chaim Bloom must establish a working relationship with long-time owner John Henry in challenging financial times.

Boston Red Sox

  • Principal Owner: John Henry
  • Chief Baseball Officer: Chaim Bloom
  • General Manager: Brian O’Halloran

Henry has been the controlling partner of the Red Sox ownership group since he, Larry Lucchino and Tom Werner purchased the team from the Yawkey Trust in 2001. The actual management of franchise operations has fluctuated depending on the individuals involved

Henry was the guy who largely revolutionized the profile of a general manager when he hired Theo Epstein, a young Yale grad with an analytical background, following the 2002 season. Under Epstein, the Red Sox won two World Series and he became a celebrity, so when Theo left following the 2011 season Henry sang from the same songbook, picking young, analytics-mined Amherst grad Ben Cherington as his successor.

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Over time, however, Henry decided that the job of running the Red Sox was too big for one person, so he pushed Cherington out and hired veteran Dave Dombrowski, who had been fired two weeks earlier as GM of the Tigers, to be the team’s “president of baseball operations.” Dombrowski promptly hired Mike Hazen, a young, analytics-minded Princeton grad, to work under him as general manager.

When Hazen left to run his own show in Arizona one season later, Dombrowski allowed the GM slot to lay fallow, running the team himself for the 2017-19 seasons. But when the Sox collapsed last summer, Henry canned Dombrowski, replacing him with Bloom, a young, analytics-minded Yale graduate at the time working as a senior vice president of baseball operations at Tampa Bay. Bloom, in turn, hired assistant Boston Red Sox GM O’Halloran, a young, analytics-minded Colby College graduate, to fill the previously vacant GM slot.

Henry gave both Epstein and Dombrowski – and Cherington, for that matter – wide latitude to operate the team. Given that one of Bloom’s first acts as president was to hire a GM, the presumption is that Henry will follow the same path moving forward; after all, even baseball teams can only tolerate so many layers of authority before they become top-heavy.

At the same time, Henry has this past winter been more than normally involved in team management, with a particular focus on prioritizing player acquisitions in the context of the team’s payroll. The issue is whether the Sox will once again, as they did last year, crash through the luxury tax threshold, even if avoiding that fate means trading stars of the stripe of Mookie Betts.

For the record, the Red Sox are nowhere near cash-strapped. Forbes last year put the franchise’s value at $3.2 billion, with revenues estimated at $516 million. Those figures have consistently ranked top five in all of MLB, and the valuation has more than doubled in the past five seasons.

Bloom’s first winter at the helm has to date been consumed by angst over how to deal with the payroll situation. Against the approximately $207 million luxury tax ceiling, the Sox spent $244 million to finish a distant third in 2019, and they’re on track to layout a further $225 million this coming season. It’s worse than that: as third-time violators of the threshold, the Red Sox stand to be taxed at a 40 percent rate for the roughly $17 million they may be over the ceiling. That’s about $7.65 million in tax, driving the functional payroll to $232.65 million.

Those numbers explain why the Sox seem so illogically committed to the concept of trading Betts, who stands to make $27 million if he plays for Boston this coming year. That is Bloom’s immediate problem.

Going forward, the question for Bloom, O’Halloran and possibly Henry is finessing a hoped-for infusion of new talent – possibly in the absence of Betts – while bringing spending under control and continuing to put a quality product on the field. Bostonians are used to that: since Henry’s arrival, the Red Sox have won more World Series (four) than any other team, and have only produced three losing seasons.

They also demand it for another reason: ticket prices. In 2019, Statista put the price of an average Fenway Park ticket at $94, fourth highest in the majors behind only the Cubs, Yankees and Dodgers. At those prices, the heat is on the Sox new management team to field a product worth seeing.

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While doing that, they also have to cope with the fallout from the sign-stealing scandal that began in Houston and has in the past couple of weeks tainted the Boston Red Sox 2018 World Series win. That process began Tuesday when the Sox and manager Alex Cora agreed to part ways following Cora’s implication in the Houston scandal. Bench coach for the Astros in 2017, Cora was named Red Sox manager in 2018, the year during which they have been accused of using illegal electronic methods to steal signs.

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