Red Sox president and CEO Sam Kennedy was at least honest when joining The Greg Hill Show Thursday morning.
Sitting at 12-25 through 37 games, Kennedy called the season "embarrassing," but the team is looking towards the future and that work begun this week.
"It really started at the trade deadline just this past week," he said. "There's no way to say it other than this year has been incredibly frustrating, disappointing, embarrassing — you can throw out all the words that you want to describe a team that has won 12 games or so here in a year where we thought we had a better shot to go out and try and compete. Obviously, when you have some injuries at the top of the rotation, and you're just not hitting, it's been an awful combination."
Kennedy added: "We have been running out different starters all year long running back and forth — taxi squad has been working overtime. It's been very frustrating, but hopefully things will improve as we go forward. It's been frustrating seeing all these different names out there. We've seen a few bright spots, but it has been frustrating seeing watching guys who haven't been successful at the major league level, to say the least."
As for the future, Kennedy did name a few players the team would like to build around, including Xander Bogaerts and Rafael Devers.
"The work began to reposition, reset, rebuild, whatever word you want to use, at the trade deadline," he said. "We made some very difficult decision in moving guys who have been apart of our core as we look back over some championship seasons and now we're building around some core players like Xander [Bogarts] and Raffy [Rafael Devers]. We now have Alex Verdugo in the mix and of course J.D. [Martinez] and guys coming back hopefully next year.
"We need to rebuild, restock that farm system, which Chaim [Bloom] and his staff have started the process, but we will be very aggressive this offseason in rebuilding the pitching staff, which is the obvious, most glaring need. That work has begun and it will continue this entire offseason as we get into 2021 and beyond.
"The goal is to build a team that can go out there and compete in the American League East. That is the goal every year. We need to do it in a sustainable way so we can be in the postseason multi years in a row, the way we were recently. That works begins now.
