A lot of people are angry about the Red Sox not spending like a contender. I agree, but at the same time, I started wondering how our $225M payroll in 2023 – still well above average – ended up producing such a poor team, given the emergence of some minimum salary contributors like Duran, Casas, and Bello.
First off, how much did the Red Sox actually spend? The Spotrac numbers are evidently not correct, because they’re missing dead money from JBJ ($8M) and Matt Barnes ($5.5M). The Fangraphs [numbers](https://www.fangraphs.com/roster-resource/payroll/red-sox?season=2023), which are close to the Red Sox Payroll Twitter numbers, have cash spending at $199M and the luxury tax number (which is based on AAV as well as additions for player benefits and pre-arb bonus pool adding \~$18M) was $224M. But beyond that, Chaim built a big buyout ($6.7M) into Justin Turner’s contract, which basically borrowed money from 2024. He also spent $15M on Yoshida’s posting fees. That still leaves them well below the Mets, Padres, Yankees, and Phillies in cash spending, but overall they’re essentially in the next tier.
There were two big contracts left over last year: Sale ($27.5M) and Devers ($17.5M). The rest of the spending was directed by Chaim. Now, buying wins in free agency is expensive – Fangraphs has the 2022 estimate at $8.5M/WAR and it might have been higher. So let’s estimate at $9M/WAR and evaluate how Chaim did.
I’m using Fangraphs [WAR leaderboard](https://www.fangraphs.com/leaders/war?lg=&teamid=3&season=2023) rather than Baseball Reference. The Fangraphs WAR Total is 27 WAR, which translates close to a 75 win team – not far from the real 78 win result. Baseball Reference has a WAR total of 38 which would be an 86 win team.
**Chaim spent $136M in free agency. At $9M/WAR, you’d expect about 15 WAR. In actuality, he got about 6 WAR.** If we were 9 wins stronger, we’d quite probably have been a clear buyer at the deadline and Chaim might still be running the show.
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Some more details:
1. I am not including trade acquisitions like Verdugo, Pivetta, Winckowski, Wong, Abreu, and Valdez.
2. I count the Hernandez extension and Barnes’ dead money since Bloom was responsible for the extension.
3. I am counting Turner as $15M in spending because of the buyout.
4. I am counting Paxton as $4M in spending, although arguably he was $10M since we paid him $6M to rehab in 2022.
5. I am not counting JBJ’s $8M in dead money because we did get prospects in the trade (although they’re probably not worth it).
6. I am spreading Yoshida’s posting fee over the length of his contract.
7. I am including Rule 5 acquisitions like Whitlock, who contributed 0.8 WAR on a $1.25M salary, and Arroyo, who contributed -0.4M on a $2M salary.
8. I am excluding some guys who came up on short stints and mostly contributed negative value (Barraclough, Garza, Alfaro, Dermody)
The best values moves were Duvall ($7M, 1.9 WAR) and Martin ($8M, 1.5 WAR). Paxton is good if you count him at $4M but just okay at $10M. Turner is a bit of an overpay at $15M – he ranks as only 1.2 WAR at Fangraphs because he gets penalized for being mostly a DH. Jansen is an overpay at $16M for 1.1 WAR although arguably he would have been more valuable on a better team with more save opportunities. Yoshida only produced 0.6 WAR for $21M (when you include the posting fee) – he is also penalized for the bad defense.
The worst moves were clearly Hernandez ($10M, -1.5 WAR) and Kluber ($10M, -0.8 WAR), but money was also wasted on Barnes ($5M), Mondesi ($3M), Joely Rodriguez ($1.5M), and Brasier ($2M). Trevor Story contributed 0.2 WAR for $23M.
11 comments
OP if you had a newsletter I’d subscribe right away. I would love to see how other GMs compare. Maybe we can compare average $/WAR for GMs.
This is a great post, thank you. The problem that I had with Bloom is that there didn’t seem to be a coordinated plan to improve the 26 man roster, that too much of it felt pieced together with bubble gum and rubber bands. This really encapsulates that, thank you.
Early this morning Peter Gammons cryptically tweeted that the 2024 payroll is going to be different than what Breslow was initially told and that it was as a result of “FSG losses.”
Does anyone have any idea what he’s talking about?
Interesting post here, great work!
I don’t really think it’s fair to account for Yoshida’s posting fee, Turner as 15 Million, or the Story signing since he was signed the year prior. Also, you’re never really going to get adequate WAR/$ value out of someone like Kenley, it seems like that’s just how the market is for closers on short-term deals.
I think subtracting Story, making Yoshida 18 million, and Turner 10.5, you see that his off-season spending last year was ~105 Million for ~6 WAR, so not great either, but a little better.
Overall though he did fine for the most part last off-season, I mean I don’t think anyone could’ve predicted Kiké turning into literally the worst player in baseball, or Kluber being awful coming off a 3 WAR season the year prior. The Yoshida contract looks bad because of how poorly he faded after around 120 games, but prior to that he was like a 130 WRC+ bat which is well worth his 18 million.
Good stuff! Great work!
Bloom was so scattershot with his roster management on the MLB level, but I think what may have bothered owners more that the Sox still have no minor league pitching.
Not that you can believe a lot that comes out of Felger and Mazz, but they had a number on their show that said the Sox farm system ranked 29th in pitching. That had to be a tough pill to swallow for FSG.
Spending like this is honestly better than not spending at all. I understand that just throwing money at ballplayers isn’t necessarily great, but the Sox should be using their money as best they can. Maybe on a $/WAR basis these contracts aren’t great, but I don’t care if the Red Sox are the most efficient with their money. I care that they are trying to field the best team.
Wow this is great analysis
FYI
WAR is not really an effective statistic to evaluate reliever performance. I remember hearing that once. Just too few innings
Thanks for the succinct analysis!
The Chaim tenure was a really confusing one for me, it seemed like there was too much stock put into injury prone players and the ones that did have success (Hunter Renfroe) were shipped off and mediocre returns.
The Barnes situation still is a hard one for me to understand, he finally saw success and they couldn’t wait to throw a pile of money at him just to fall apart again.
I think my biggest issue with Chaim’s pre-2023 offseason — and this isn’t hindsight, I made this exact criticism at the time — is that he could have gotten one of the upper-mid SP FAs for about the same AAV as Kenley. The pitching market was garbage, and I don’t blame him for not shelling out for the top targets (Verlander, deGrom, Rodon) but we should have pushed harder for Eovaldi, Senga or Bassitt. I know there’s some uncertainty over whether we had a chance at Eovaldi (we made an offer and he might have just wanted to go to the Rangers) but afaik we were never even in on Bassitt, and if he was willing to go to Canada for such a reasonable contract, we probably should have been able to get him.
Right now we could have Bassitt in our rotation instead of Kenley in our bullpen for just $4 million more. Think about how much more stable and competitive our current roster would look.