One opened the season out of position. Another never should've been counted on to stay healthy. A third is a typical dumpster dive for a front office that has never seen a 7.00 ERA it doesn't like.
Taken together, they help explain how the Red Sox could be 10 times closer to last place than the final wild card spot, five games behind the Blue Jays. They're Kiké Hernández, Chris Sale, and Mauricio Llovera, a trio representing the team-building failures that have the Red Sox pointed towards their fourth playoff miss in five years.
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All three expose various weaknesses of Chaim Bloom's approach to roster construction, at least in this in-between era while he awaits the arrival of the next generation of talent that is by no means guaranteed to keep pace with the Orioles and Rays atop the division.
Start with Hernández. The Red Sox nailed it when they signed him away from the Dodgers in 2021 and eventually made him their starting center fielder, where the lifelong utility player flashed Gold Glove-caliber defense.
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An abdominal injury robbed him of all usefulness last year, but that didn't stop the Red Sox from re-signing him for one year and $10 million before pinning our eyeballs open in the style of a Clockwork Orange and dubiously making him the centerpiece of their offseason marketing campaign.
As if force-feeding him down our gullets wasn't bad enough, they decided that, rather than replace shortstop Trevor Story when they announced in early January that he needed modified Tommy John surgery, they'd simply move Hernández there.
The move weakened them in center and proved disastrous at short, where Hernández consistently threw wildly while leading the league in errors. His porous defense contributed to the team's woeful start and necessitated the insertion of journeyman Yu Chang and A's castoff Pablo Reyes to solidify the defense up the middle.
When Bloom finally pulled the plug in July and shipped Hernández back to the Dodgers, it was addition by subtraction.
The same cannot be said of Sale, who represents a different kind of mistake. Unlike Hernández, the skinny left-hander actually delivered over the first two months, going 5-2 while striking out nearly 11 batters per nine innings. He was just finding his groove when he inevitably left a start with a broken shoulder blade. He hasn't pitched since, though he is expected to return on Friday.
The error in judgment that everyone could see coming was counting on Sale in the first place. The Red Sox opened the season with a rotation fronted by three injury-prone pitchers – Sale, James Paxton, and Garrett Whitlock. Only Paxton has remained healthy, with predictable consequences.
Rather than acquire more starting depth this winter, the Red Sox relied upon their internal solutions. The result has been a rotation employing multiple openers for more than a month. Some of that is due to bad luck – Tanner Houck took a line drive off the face – but the rest was entirely foreseeable, particularly Sale.
He might be the only pitcher in history to break two bones simply in the act of pitching, not to mention a third fracture he suffered after falling off his bike (and a fourth when a line drive mangled his pinkie). We all knew he wouldn't survive the season, and we suspect he won't last the rest of this one. His fragility and unreliability now supersede his talent. There's no excuse for relying on him.
At least he's still capable of delivering. It's harder to determine why Llovera is even here. The burly right-hander arrived from the Giants on July 26 as one of Bloom's typical buy-low bullpen candidates, with a lifetime ERA of 6.13.
While the Rays added Aaron Civale and the Orioles picked up Jack Flaherty and the Jays bolstered their bullpen and infield, Bloom gave manager Alex Cora little more than Llovera and infielder Luis Urias.
Llovera has appeared in five games, all losses. He hasn't exactly been an innocent bystander, either. After loading the bases in the eighth inning of his debut, he took the loss against his former team, was on the mound when the Mariners pulled of an embarrassing Little League double steal of home, let the Blue Jays put a 7-3 victory out of reach, and then couldn't handle sacrificial mop-up duty in Sunday's series finale, allowing five runs before being lifted.
Whatever the Red Sox saw in his pitch mix or spin rates or movement profile isn't taking, and there's been far too much of that over the last four years, with Bloom constantly seeking reliable bullpen arms via low-leverage acquisitions that come and go like driftwood.
He has broken that pattern a handful of times, and mostly with solid results, whether it's former Yankees right-hander Adam Ottavino, or this year's reliable late-innings duo of All-Star Kenley Jansen and right-hander Chris Martin. It turns out the Tampa model of putting relievers through the thresher only works in Tampa.
In any event, the Red Sox now find themselves facing long postseason odds, a fact that not even Reyes' walkoff grand slam on Monday can change, because it takes more than one hit to overcome the team-building mistakes that have put the team in its current predicament.
