McAdam: Chaim Bloom officially hired, current executives to remain with Sox

In addition to officially hiring Chaim Bloom to run their Baseball Operations department  -- the deal was made official late Friday afternoon, with Bloom given the title of chief baseball officer -- the Red Sox have also managed to retain the remainder of their baseball ops staff.

Under the new restructuring, Brian O'Halloran, who has been with the Red Sox since 2002 and was last offseason promoted to assistant GM, will now work as the team's general manager, reporting directly to Bloom. The arrangement is similar to the one the Sox had in 2016, when Dave Dombrowski was the team's president of baseball operations and longtime front office assistant Mike Hazen was elevated to GM.



O'Halloran handled a multitude of duties in recent years, including salary arbitration, working on a variety of smaller transactions and contractual negotiations. He, along with fellow assistant GMs Eddie Romero and Zack Scott and senior vice president of major and minor league operations Raquel Ferreira, have been running the team since Sept. 9, when Dombrowski was summarily dismissed, just 11 months after winning a World Series for the franchise.

Under Dombrowski, the consensus was, O'Halloran, Romero and Scott were all under-utilized, as Dombrowski chose to rely more on Frank Wren and Tony La Russa -- two longtime acquaintances -- to serve as his inner circle of trust. Bloom is likely to welcome more input from his staff and involve them more thoroughly in all aspects of the department.

"I don't know him personally,'' said one veteran talent evaluator with a National League club, "but from talking to people who do, I've heard three things about him: creative, forward-thinking and collaborative.''

Undoubtedly, those qualities led the Red Sox to show interest in Bloom in the first place. Though the organization was said to have sounded out the interest of some bigger names through back channels, a baseball source confirmed that Bloom was the only one interviewed.

As a demonstration of that willingness to incorporate ideas from others, Bloom, in addition to promoting O'Halloran, will inherit and retain to other assistant general managers.

Scott's background is in analytics, and Bloom is expected to be more receptive to his input than was Dombrowski, who, though not averse to data, took a more traditional approach to player evaluation, relying more on scouting for player evaluation.

Romero, who is known to have aspirations to become a GM, will remain as well, likely to continue to oversee the team's international development and other scouting areas.

It's expected that Ferreira will also remain in her current role.

MLB.com was the first to report O'Halloran's promotion to GM.