The Red Sox plan to replace Xander Bogaerts with Trevor Story got elbowed out:
Red Sox chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom said Tuesday that Story underwent an internal bracing procedure on his right ulnar collateral ligament. The operation is less drastic than the full ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction known as Tommy John surgery, which usually leads to a year of rehab.
“I certainly would not rule out a return sometime during 2023,” Bloom said during a news conference, a day after Texas Rangers team physician Dr. Keith Meister operated on Story’s right elbow. “But it’s also not something at this stage we want to bank on.”
ESPN.com
So Boston now has to replace both middle infielders for most of this season. Story only played 94 games in 2022 due to injury. When a team signs a 30-year-old to a six year contract, they’d like to get most of the value in the first couple of seasons before a large decline sets in. It looks like that’s not going to happen.
Yeah, sad. This doesn’t bode well for Story’s tenure with the Sox, or the rest of his career. It’s a lot to come back from. On the other hand, medicine and science are better than ever. A lot depends on his character and drive now– now that he’s rich, aging, and injured. I’m rooting for him.
But this entire saga has been spectacularly mismanaged. He should have had this surgery months ago. If you’re going to miss a season it was last year not this year. Tempis fugit. This and the Xander extension (or trade) needed to be resolved before this totally predictable, totally avoidable double emergency. A ten year-old GM on PlayStation franchise mode doesn’t make these kind of mistakes. Somebody, probably multiple people, ought to be fired.
Look if everything works out perfect for the Sox next year they’re what… an entertaining Wild Card caliber team, obviously still missing many pieces?
But things don’t usually work out perfect. It’s more likely they miss on half or more of the HUGE gambles they’re taking, and by mid season it will probably be obvious they’re short a half-dozen everyday players, and don’t have a rotation. God forbid anybody else gets hurt. Not like that’s happened every year for a century?
This season could go wrong in 50 ways.
The scary thing is even signing a Judge- or Ohtani-level talent doesn’t fix this team. They’re not even close, to being at the level where even a notional, magical Nuevo Pedro or Papi Jr. level talent eruption redeems the years of chronic talent mismanagement and pervasive mediocrity.
The total lack of articulated vision is also inexplicable, in this market. (Even Lou Gorman had a makeable argument, at the time, he didn’t have anywhere to play Willy McGee!)
Anecdotally: an interesting MLB subplot in the younger generation is I’m seeing is boys rooting for their favorite players, regardless of what team or market. The corollary is perhaps a rationally-learned distrust or dispassion for the Red Sox. That’s a huge change in a generation. I wonder if that’s video games?
Or perhaps a kind of immune response vs years of this new boom-bust “Florida” budget/management culture? It’s really hard to have Faith in or passion for an organization that appears to be phoning it in half the time, and not just tolerant of but eager to wallow in collective mediocrity. This is not a cyclical town; it doesn’t want to be.