Since Chaim Bloom was hired as Red Sox chief baseball officer he’s often emphasized the importance of improving the club’s farm system and building organizational depth.
Three years in, are his efforts paying off?
Though most experts believe the Red Sox system is in better shape than when Bloom took over, there is disagreement over how much the organization’s picture has improved.
Keith Law of The Athletic recently ranked the Red Sox system No. 23 out of 30, writing “their group of position-player prospects is probably in the upper half of farm systems, but their group of pitching prospects is one of the weakest.”
ESPN’s Kiley McDaniel was much higher on the Red Sox system, ranking it No. 14, and Baseball America and MLB Pipeline have yet to release their 2023 preseason rankings.
To the casual fan those rankings likely don’t inspire confidence. Shouldn’t the Red Sox be in the top 10 by now? To get a more complete picture we reached out to SoxProspects.com editor in chief Chris Hatfield, a former Eagle-Tribune sportswriter whose website has become an indispensable resource for all things related to the Red Sox minor league system.
Hatfield’s take on Bloom’s minor league rebuild? Trending right, but still a work in progress.
“It’s a system that’s definitely been improving,” Hatfield said. “I think some of the moves they’ve made haven’t quite panned out the way they would have liked but it’s definitely a lot better than it was.”
A lot of bites at the apple
Coming into the new season Hatfield said he expected to see the Red Sox fall in the No. 11-15 range in the preseason organizational rankings and believes Baseball America and MLB Pipeline’s assessments will be closer in line with McDaniel’s than with Law’s.
Why the middle of the pack? Though the Red Sox do have more high end talent than they used to, the system is also somewhat top heavy.
“Once you get to around the back end of the top 20 it does fall off a decent amount,” Hatfield said. “But they do have some guys that are close to helping.”
Right now the Red Sox have four consensus Top 100 prospects: shortstop Marcelo Mayer, first baseman Triston Casas, infielder/outfielder Ceddanne Rafaela and outfielder Miguel Bleis.
Bleis in particular could be the system’s breakout star in 2023. Hatfield said he and his team were blown away by the 18-year-old Dominican’s talent when they scouted him in Fort Myers last spring and they received a lot of feedback pegging him as “by far” the best prospect in the Florida Complex League. The rest of the scouting community now appears to be taking notice as well.
“He’s the only prospect on our list that we give a potential eight ceiling on the 20-80 grading scale,” Hatfield said of the 2021 international free agent signing. “Because if everything clicks and he winds up with five plus tools, that’s a potentially really special player.”
Hatfield said the Red Sox have also done well recently in the draft and international free agent market, though those players are still years away from contributing at the big league level. Where the club’s results haven’t been as strong is in outside trades, with the Red Sox failing to acquire any prospects who are currently top 100 quality in the deals for Mookie Betts, Andrew Benintendi, Hunter Renfroe, Christian Vazquez or Jay Groome.
That being said, the Red Sox did also acquire more than a dozen players combined in those five trades, many of whom do have promise. Hatfield believes that isn’t an accident and the Red Sox have preferred not to put all their eggs in one basket when making deals.
“I would guess the thinking is the more guys you have that you like, the more chances one of them pops and something clicks,” Hatfield said.
Working towards sustainability
Something that stands out about the Red Sox system is there are two distinct “bubbles” coming up.
One has already reached Triple-A or even the majors and is just about ready to contribute right now. The other is still in Single-A and likely at least two years away.
“The depth of the system is really in A ball right now,” Hatfield said.
The sparse in-between at Double-A is the reason why the Red Sox aren’t in the top 10, and filling that gap will be the next step the club has to reach before it can be compared to the an organization like the Los Angeles Dodgers, who always seem to have a bottomless supply of prospects coming up year after year.
A sustainable pipeline of young talent is ultimately the end game, but even in the short term the Red Sox situation is probably better than the rankings suggest.
For one, the rankings don’t factor in young standouts who have already seen sufficient time in the big leagues. For the Red Sox that includes Brayan Bello, who pitched enough innings last year to graduate from prospect status but who remains a tantalizing young talent.
A more glaring example, Hatfield noted, is the Atlanta Braves. The rankings list them as having one of the worst farm systems in baseball, but they also just had the top two finishers in last year’s National League Rookie of the Year vote and have already locked up half a dozen franchise building blocks in their mid-20s to lengthy extensions.
With Bello, Casas and Garrett Whitlock ready to supplement Rafael Devers through the rest of the decade, the Red Sox are starting to see the contours of a similar young core take shape.
“I think it has a stronger young base than they’ve had in a while,” Hatfield said. “And I think that’s on purpose.”
Email: mcerullo@northofboston.com. Twitter: @MacCerullo.