Chaim Bloom believes ‘pretty strongly’ Red Sox are in better position now than in 2019

Chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom was asked on MassLive.com’s Fenway Rundown podcast if he thinks the Red Sox are in a better position now than they were in October 2019 when ownership hired him.

Boston was one year removed from a World Series championship when it fired Dave Dombrowski in ‘19. The 2019 Red Sox went 84-78 and finished third in the AL East.

“I do. I believe that pretty strongly,” Bloom said. “Now again, it’s a touchy subject because that involves me kind of implicitly having an opinion about a lot of things good and bad that happened before I was here and in fact, when I was competing against the organization. But I do believe pretty strongly that’s the case.”

The Red Sox finished last in the division in 2020 and ‘22 under Bloom. They made the ALCS in 2021 but regressed in 2022 with a 78-84 record.

Bloom of course has traded stars Mookie Betts and Andrew Benintendi. He also lost Xander Bogaerts to the Padres in free agency this offseason. He did sign Rafael Devers to a 10-year, $313.5-million contract extension.

Under Bloom, Boston has built a better farm system, which ranked 22nd when Dombrowski was dismissed.Baseball America ranked the Red Sox’s farm system 11th on its midseason rankings in 2022.

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Is Bloom’s opinion on the organization being in a better spot based a lot on how the farm system has improved?

“I can say some things that some of them are fact and some of them you could say are opinion but I think are pretty wildly-held opinions that you had a team at that point (in ‘19) that as a unit was pretty clearly past whatever its peak performance was on top of a farm system that I think the consensus around the game was that it was a lower-third farm system,” Bloom said. “And a lot of talent that was in that farm system was far away. And when you’re in that situation — and on top of being in that situation and that current team probably being third or fourth in the division and having the highest payroll in baseball — that usually doesn’t mean good things are coming for an organization that’s in that position. That story usually doesn’t end well. And that’s why we took the course that we took. If we had stayed on the course we were on, we would have ended up in a deep, deep hole that would have taken years and years to come out of. And instead because we made some hard decisions — it doesn’t mean we’ve gotten every single one right — we were two games from the World Series one season later because of the decisions that we made.

“And coming out of that with what I think is not just my opinion but opinions around the game would say a dramatically improved longterm talent base,” Bloom added. “We tried to build on that in 2022 and we just didn’t get it done. We’ve got to own that. We’ve got to point to different reasons why. Some of them we could control. Some of them we couldn’t. So that’s on us. But I do think still now looking forward, we were able to have some success, not as much as we would have liked, on the way to getting to the point we’re at. And I think very clearly have a better outlook looking forward than we did at that time.”