By Tony Massarotti, 98.5 The Sports Hub
You honestly should not be annoyed that the Red Sox exchanged Andrew Benintendi. But you have to be furious about what they got for him, because it definitely feels like a gift.
Last night, in case you missed it, the Red Sox sent Benintendi to the Kansas City Royals in a three-team deal that landed them off-field player Franchy Cordero of the Royals and thrower Josh Winckowski of the New York Mets. Winckowski is a 16th round player who has never beaten Single-A. Cordero is an athletic monster who allegedly has the baseball instinct of a hockey player.
And get it: the Red Sox are send $ 2.8 million to the Royals to cover nearly half of his $ 6.6 million salary this season.
Here’s what ESPN’s David Schoenfield wrote about Cordero just after midnight:
I guess you never know, but the chances seem slim that the tools will ever come together. Maybe the Red Sox see something they believe they can fix, but the reconnaissance reports on Cordero have always mentioned that he simply scores low in his natural baseball instincts.
In honesty with the Red Sox, Winckowski sounds like he has a chance. And let me stress – A CHANCE. He is only June 23rd. He is 6 feet-4 and 202 pounds. In 54 career games in minor leagues – 53 starts – he has an ERA of 3.35 with 237 results and 86 runs in 263 overs. But he has also been traded twice.
The real questions here are about the overall values and direction of the Red Sox organization as a whole, especially when General Manager Chaim Bloom sounds apologetic after the agreement, which does not exactly inspire confidence.
Bloom said: ” I know for our fans that this is not the first time this past year, plus that they see a player who is important to them and important to the organization. I know it’s hard. I know it’s painful. Of course, we do what we think is right for the organization. … We felt we were able to meet a number of needs. It sets us up well enough in the future that it was worth swallowing hard and taking that painful step of trading a player who is very important to us and very talented. ”
Let us say it again: the issue has not traded Benintendi, which has been disappointing for the past few years. The issue is about what the Red Sox are building. Cordero does not sound like a baseball player. When I read his profile, the first name I thought of was Wily Mo Pena, a physically imposing powerhouse who acquired the Red Sox in 2006. It basically took a year here before they became the second team to reach its “potential,” which is a dirty word in sports.It’s a euphemism for “underachiever.” There is nothing worse than a good athlete who does not have the skills to play baseball, and Cordero does not feel much of a ball player.
Look, Chaim Bloom deserves a chance. Between the mess he inherited and the pandemic, he had just really started rebuilding the Red Sox. But since the 2020 season deadline, it certainly feels like the Red Sox have become Tampa Bay North – albeit without Tom Brady – which is a good way to say they added a collection of mismatches and rejections from other organizations has. I’m not kidding Bloom. I’m just saying it doesn’t feel like the Sox are building a championship-caliber organization just because they throw things against the wall.
All this brings us back to Benintendi and a very simple question: what happened here? His regression has been so sharp over the past two years that it has felt like an organizational failure in player development. In 2018, he was a well-rounded, true baseball player, with 41 doubles, 103 runs, a .830 OPS, 16 homers and 21 steals while playing a good defense. He has since done nothing but get worse. Did the Red Sox try to turn him into a home switch by announcing launch angle and power? Is a man like him no longer fit for the basic, analytically-driven, modern game? Was there a personality conflict with instructors? Something went wrong here. Something worrying.
And then there’s more: from 2013-2016, the Red Sox had drafts where they picked seventh, seventh and 12th place. With those choices, they unleashed Trey Ball, Benintendi and Jay Groome. That was all before Bloom arrived here, so it’s not his fault. But it does speak of gross organizational failure.
This year, as we all know, they have the fourth choice in the concept, their highest position since the 1960s. Let’s hope they make good use of it. If this is not the case then maybe ours is not going to last much longer.
You can hear Tony Massarotti on weekdays from 2pm to 6pm EST on the Felger & Massarotti program. Follow him on Twitter @TonyMassarotti.