Dave Dombrowski’s One-Year Check-Up

Dave Dombrowski has been on the job for almost exactly a year. It’s probably time for us to sit down with him and give him a good old performance review. Most standard performance reviews are centered around working well with others, dealing with assignments in a timely and professional manner, employee development, and other such things. With Dombrowski, we’re not worried about any of that. With Dombrowski, the question at hand boils down to this: Has he helped the Red Sox win more games both now and in the future?

To find out the answer, let’s go back over his year in Boston. Because he didn’t do much in terms of player movement after taking over the team until the off-season, we’ll start our review there.

Off-Season Moves

Dombrowski came in with a reputation for big moves and decimating farm systems, though that was primarily due to his time in Detroit. Still that was the worry when he came to Boston and took over control of a team with a big payroll and a deep farm system. At least initially he lived up to his reputation. His first move was picking up Clay Buchholz’s $13.5 million option. Buchholz had been hurt the year before, but had pitched well when healthy and given the price of pitching (foreshadowing!) it was and should have been an easy call. He also re-signed Sandy Leon and outrighted him off the 40 man as a way to keep him in Triple-A as a contingency plan.

Then things got big. He traded Manuel Margot, Carlos Asuaje, and Logan Allen to the Padres for reliever Craig Kimbrel. Then he signed outfielder Chris Young to a two year, $13 million deal. Then he went huge. He signed David Price to a seven year, $217 million contract with an opt-out after year three. He finished up by trading Wade Miley to the Mariners for Roenis Elias and Carson Smith.

It’s difficult to distill all of that, but I’ll try. Essentially the Red Sox were trying to win in 2016 and Dombrowski’s moves were designed to improve the major league roster right now. He tried to improve the bullpen by bringing in two top bullpen arms, paying dearly for Kimbrel in the process. Neither has been a success to date as Smith’s TJ surgery caused him to miss the season and Kimbrel’s control and health have deserted him. He’s still a good reliever but he’s not been anything close to the guy who garnered Cy Young votes for Atlanta a few years ago.

Price deserves and gets his own paragraph. He’s had such a strange season it’s difficult to know what to say, as his strikeouts have jumped and his walks have stayed down, but he’s just repeatedly gotten hit, and often all at once. The end result: He’s not been the ace starter the Red Sox are paying for. It’s this huge discrepancy more than any other single thing that looks to be the difference between a division-winning team and missing the playoffs. As of now, this contract is as big a disaster as you could have imagined with Price remaining healthy.

Chris Young and Sandy Leon are, bizarrely the huge wins here. Leon has been one of the best hitting catchers in baseball and has saved the Sox from the injuries and underperformance of the three guys they had slotted ahead of him. After a slow start, Young was fantastic against righties and lefties, which is promising, but then he got hurt and, so far, that’s been that.

Right now this off-season isn’t as bad as giving Pablo Sandoval and Hanley Ramirez expensive long-term contracts and then watching them both become the two worst players in baseball, but given the money committed, the years given up, and the minor league talent traded away, it’s pretty damn bad.

I should note there is every possibility that things look very different a year from now. Think of how Hanley is viewed now compared to this time last season, or how John Lackey went from a huge disaster to a World Series-winning hero. Things can and do change, but we’re judging on what’s happened to date and that has been downright yucky.

Right now this off-season isn’t as bad as giving Pablo Sandoval and Hanley Ramirez expensive long-term contracts and then watching them both become the two worst players in baseball, but given the money committed, the years given up, and the minor league talent traded away, it’s pretty damn bad.

In-Season Moves

Whether because of Dombrowski, lousy luck, or both, the Red Sox found themselves in need of a starting pitcher in what turned out to be a very dry market. Dombrowski got one of the only known above average starters available when he traded Anderson Espinoza for Drew Pomeranz. This was a heavy cost but the Sox were in dire straits.

They were in dire straits because Boston’s starting pitching had fallen apart mid-season. It’s difficult to get too down on Dombrowski for this considering it’s hard to plan for Eduardo Rodriguez, Clay Buchholz, Joe Kelly, Henry Owens, Roenis Elias, and Brian Johnson all being unable to hold down a rotation slot for one reason or another. That’s a lot of guys to have disappear into the ether. Where you could fault Dombrowski is for signing Price and not, say, two starters. For slightly more than the cost of Price alone, Dombrowski could have brought in both Johnny Cueto and Jordan Zimmermann. Would it have been better to do that? Maybe, though it would’ve meant making a different type of bet than the one Dombrowski made with Price. In the end it meant giving up Boston’s best pitching prospect since probably Clay Buchholz or Jon Lester.

Dombrowski also traded for Aaron Hill (Aaron Wilkerson and Wendell Rijo), Brad Ziegler (Jose Almonte and the wrong Basabe), and Fernando Abad (Pat Light). Hill hasn’t hit much in a very small sample, Ziegler has thrown 11 innings and given up six runs (four earned), and Abad has been, forgive me, bad. None of these deals were ill-considered or especially reckless individually, but all of them packaged portions of Boston’s minor league depth for veteran players. Again, this was going to happen because the team was trying to win now. But there is a cost to doing these deals and eventually it catches up to you, so you’d like the players you bring to Boston to actually perform in the short time they’re here. So far, they really haven’t.

We should mention that since taking over, Dombrowski hasn’t done much in the way of pink slips. He’s kept the major league coaching staff in tact and the vast majority of the baseball operations department has remained in place as well. Mostly what he’s done is make go-for-it moves, prospects for vets, that Ben Cherington likely wouldn’t have made. And we can be pretty sure that Cherington wouldn’t have signed David Price either given he was the one in charge when Jon Lester left (though it wouldn’t shock me to read in the paper one day sometime in the future that letting Lester go was never Cherington’s idea and he was following orders from above).

The good of the Red Sox season can be found due to the young position players already on the team in Jackie Bradley, Mookie Betts, Xander Bogaerts, Travis Shaw, and Andrew Benintendi. Dombrowski deserves points for not trading any of them, and for letting them develop. Similarly, we’ve made it through an entire year of Dombrowski without him dealing away Yoan Moncada, Rafael Devers, or Anderson… never mind.

So Dombrowski’s review probably didn’t go very well. The team is older, more expensive, and with a weaker farm system now than when he took over a year ago. The performance on the field has been improved over last season, though as has been noted at this site and elsewhere, the team has been sputtering along since May with little to recommend them as a legitimate contender, and that’s should they even reach the post-season at all, something that looks less and less likely with each lost series.

Perhaps the most interesting question in all of this is, what’s next? Does Dave Dombrowski take stock of all this and come to some conclusions about the way he’s been evaluating talent, about the trades he’s been making and the free agents he’s brought in, some conclusion that alters the way he’s been thinking about this team and about team building in general?

There isn’t any kind of answer to that question that I can provide, and truthfully, there probably isn’t one that Dombrowski can provide either. His moves haven’t worked so far, but he’s not a dumb man. He’s had success in similar jobs before. He’ll evaluate the team, the coaches, the front office, and himself based not on how they’re doing on August 12, but on how they finish the season. Red Sox fans can only hope whatever he decides to do provides better results than the returns from his first year in office.

Photo by Mark L. Baer/USA TODAY