Chaim Bloom isn’t playing dumb. He was acutely aware quickly that there was a substantial gap between the Boston Red Sox and two of their stars in negotiation talks.
The Red Sox lowballed both Rafael Devers and Xander Bogaerts in their extension talks leading up to the season – which are now tabled because an agreement was never reached. The Red Sox reportedly were around $100 million apart in their offers to both Devers and Bogaerts.
While the Devers situation is a little less dire since he’s under team control through the 2023 season, Bogaerts can and all but certainly will opt out of his deal after this season.
It’s a tough spot, one the Red Sox chief baseball officer addressed Thursday on WEEI's "The Greg Hill Show."
"What I will say, generally, whenever you're talking extensions -- free agency is free agency -- when you're talking extension and doing things early, so to speak, now you're adding more variables, right? There's risk that gets shared, there's upside that gets shared, there's just much more potential, even if the desire is there and the player wants to be here and we want the player here, there's just much more potential for people to see the world differently.
"In those cases, without getting into too much detail, it was fairly clear early on that we weren't going to align. If we were seeing the world exactly the same, we would've aligned. But those guys are still here, and we didn't find that alignment this time, and there here and we're all going to try to go out and try to win a World Series and will have a chance to pick this up again down the road. And things will be different for everybody at that point in time, and we'll see where we're at and hopefully we can find that path. ...
"Again, I don’t want to get into the truth or lack thereof about anything that’s out there. Look, I think every discussion you have with any player about these sorts of things, the discussions start somewhere. Sometimes they progress and sometimes they don’t, so obviously if these discussions had progressed, we’d be in a different place right now. They didn’t, and again, we’re excited to pick it up again down the road."
Everyone in the Red Sox organization has made clear that they picture Devers and Bogaerts as franchise cornerstones who will remain in Boston long-term, as well they should.
But there’s a chasm there and everyone is aware of it, and at this juncture the Red Sox must be hoping they didn’t fracture the relationship by being so far off.
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