The Boston Red Sox have built themselves a squad blended with a nice group of up-and-comers mixed established veterans.
One potential problem: many of those established veterans are about to be free agents.
The Red Sox’ list of players entering the final year of their contract in 2022 is long. Among others, J.D. Martinez, Nathan Eovaldi, Kiké Hernández, Christian Vazquez and Kevin Plawecki will be free agents after this season.
Oh, Xander Bogaerts also has an opt out he’s likely to exercise, while Rafael Devers will be a free agent after the 2023 campaign.
That’s a long list of items for Chaim Bloom to take care of, and he explained to WEEI’s Rob Bradford how he navigates such situations.
“We should be able to do it all,” Bloom responded when asked about getting everything he needs done on time. “It’s harder in the spring, there’s a lot going on, there’s so much coming out of the lockout that we had to catch up on. So many different things that happened the first couple of weeks of camp, and already we’re at that end of camp rush where there’s also a lot of things going on. But ideally, we work well enough together that we should be able to do everything we want to do while still having a good process on all of it.
“In my experience, all (negotiations are) different. Obviously, nothing gets done without a back-and-forth. But they all kind of move at their own pace, basically. This is a different type of spring, so there is a lot more going on, everything is a little more condensed. But just speaking candidly about it, if there’s momentum you usually find a way.”
Devers’ situation is a unique one. In many cases, young players of his caliber have a long-term extension done at this point in his team control.
So far though, there’s been no movement on that front -- at least none that's been leaked publicly. Perhaps that’s because of the long list of items more quickly running out of runway to get done. Either way, Devers isn't a free agent until after next season, and in the short-term there are a number of marquee players in need of a new deal.
Bloom does not sound like someone looking to rush more than he needs to in order to hammer something out.
“It’s hard to compare (this spring) to anything just because this spring is so unique in so many ways," Bloom said. "And look, when these things happen before they ‘need to’ that means there could be other times, there could be other opportunities to address things. Just because a lot of players are in certain situations doesn’t mean it makes sense to try to charge at all of them. We just try to assess every situation the best we can, figure out what makes sense for us as an organization, what’s the best way to overlap with a player if there is a chance to overlap and go from there. We try to take every situation individually, be mindful of the organization’s needs but each of these guys is an individual.”
Bogaerts is on the record saying that when spring training is over he’s done talking about his contract. When he signed his extension in 2019, it was on the Sunday of the first regular-season series of the year, so momentum had to have been building during spring training.
Suffice it to say that if nothing is done by Thursday, there’s a high likelihood that Bogaerts will get his wish of not doing contract negotiations in-season.
“I think you have to respect what a player wants," Bloom said. "I’ve been in situations where the door closes on Opening Day and then it reopens for whatever reason. But there’s no point in trying to do something that a player doesn’t want to do. And when somebody wants to focus on their craft once the season starts I think you have to respect that.”
The Red Sox open their regular season Thursday against the New York Yankees.
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