Universal Praise for Red Sox Hiring Chaim Bloom Proves Mets Blew it Yet Again in 2018 | ADAM BOMB
By Adam Weinrib
Hello. I'm a New York Yankee fan who generally has no deep-seated desire to despise the fans of the orange and blue team who share my borough.
Except when they bungle a front office decision so spectacularly that, one year later, they allow the Boston Red Sox to hire a dream candidate on a silver platter --someone who never should've been available to them if those who made decisions for the Mets possessed even a shred of competency.
You know, the kind of effortless scenario that seems to repeatedly fall in Boston's lap once or twice a year since 2002. When one of those is the fault of the Mets for hiring a cardboard cutout of Patrick Warburton instead of a competent roster builder who works on a shoestring budget, then my blood gets its well-deserved annual boil.
With Chaim Bloom taking over baseball operations for the Red Sox, as @joelsherman1 reported, Boston injects a brilliant young mind into a front office already with a lot of brainpower. Under Dave Dombrowski, much of it was sidelined. They won a ring, yes, but this optimizes them.
— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) October 25, 2019
A year ago, Chaim Bloom, then 35, was preparing to depart the Rays and settle into his first GM role with the New York Mets, a team that perennially refuses to operate with the big budget that should be their birthright. Even financially hamstrung, though, Bloom can still work wonders; he's innovated to bring the Rays near the top of the AL East over the past decade-plus with little-to-no windfall. All New York had to do was select and empower Bloom, and ignore the overtures of his main competitor, Brodie Van Wagenen, someone who was inexplicably already the agent for many of their most important players.
Genius waiting for a chance, or "Wolf of Wall Street" extra who'd never made an acquisition before: Which way did the Mets bend?
Chaim Bloom was the runner-up in the Mets’ GM search last year.
— Tim Healey (@timbhealey) October 25, 2019
His getting a top baseball ops job was inevitable, and comparing the future paths of the Mets and Red Sox now becomes much more interesting (to me, at least). https://t.co/bhMssE18CY
It's fair to speculate, at this point, whether Mets ownership (the blessed Wilpons) refused to give Bloom full roster control and the larger budget he so desired, and instead defaulted to the type of malleable baseball mind they could force to operate in a room without a lightbulb. We'll never know where the chasm was drawn, but we do know the Mets hired Van Wagenen, who gutted their farm system to absorb the Robinson Cano contract and add a reliever -- baseball's most volatile commodity -- and Bloom will now head to Boston, the path to a dynasty fully cleared.
Thanks to the financial considerations of the Dombrowski administration, Bloom may have to clear Mookie Betts over the next few months, as well as JD Martinez and some pitching. He may have a cleaner slate when 2020 opens than any fan of the 2018 World Series champions probably anticipated at this juncture. But Bloom's methodology bred sustainability in Tampa Bay, with shrewd trades adding big league talent while declining to neglect the farm at any point, which eventually built the game's best system by varied means.
Sounds like something the National League fans of New York would enjoy. Instead, their sideshow continues, as Yankee fans have now acquired a genuine reason to hate them for the first time in a long time.