In contrast to the last two baseball offseasons, the pace has already picked up this winter with some significant free-agent signings and even a couple of trades.
To date, however, the Red Sox have been conspicuously quiet.
"There's been a ton of conversations (for us),'' Red Sox chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom told reporters at the Winter Meetings in San Diego. "I think it's hard to handicap exactly what the pace of those will be and if and when any of those will turn into some kind of news. But you can see around the industry that the pace has picked up, particularly since the tender date last week and that's been reflected in the amount of the conversations we've been having.''
The Sox are in the unique position of trying to cut payroll, but Bloom said that doesn't mean they have to wait to react to other things going on in the industry.
"Not necessarily,'' he said. "There are certainly some guys out there you might not pursue unless something (else) happens. I think certain acquisitions fit a narrower niche than others do. But I think it's more about trying to assess the whole landscape, trying to make sure that we are active enough to understand all the opportunities that are available to us and react accordingly. That doesn't mean that the dominoes have to fall in a certain sequence. We just need to make sure that we are doing things in an order that ultimately makes sense.''
General manager Brian O'Halloran echoed a similar thought, noting
that the Sox don't feel the need to wait for other things to happen before they act.
"It's impossible to say whether something that happens in the market will directly impact other things that we want to do,'' O'Halloran told reporters. "But certainly, it's all interconnected. So we have to be there and having conversations and know what is available or could be available to us. I don't think we have to wait for any one specific player to sign or to be traded to necessarily know what we need to do. We have to be aware of all the opportunities and go from there.''
The Sox might end up moving one or more veteran players in an effort to trim nearly $30 million in salaries, but Bloom said it was difficult to predict whether such deals would happen.
"Hard to handicap right now,'' he said. " I wouldn't want to venture a guess.''
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