McAdam: Nine members of Red Sox' scouting and player development let go

A total of nine members of the Red Sox scouting and player development staff were told Friday their contracts would not be renewed and were let go by the organization, multiple sources told BostonSportsJournal.com.

Four members of the Red Sox pro scouting staff were dismissed: Special assignment scout Brad Sloan; Tim Huff; Bob Hamelin and John Lombardo.

In addition, two members of the organization's amateur scouting were let go and three members of the Player Development Staff.

Sloan is the biggest name of the group to go, with 40 years of major league scouting experience, the last five with the Red Sox. He had served as a special assignment scout for the organization. Hamelin, meanwhile, is remembered for a six-year career with the Kansas City Royals and was named the A.L. Rookie of the Year in 1994. He, too, had been with the Red Sox for a number of years.

While other organizations have instituted sweeping layoffs due to the pandemic and steep losses in revenue, these moves did not appear to be financially driven. Rather, they're more the result of some reorganization of the three departments -- pro scouting, amateur scouting and player development -- that are taking place within the Red Sox.

Typically, these personnel changes take place after the end of the regular season, at which point an organization is making a determination about roles for the following season. That the moves were done with just over three weeks remaining in the shortened 60-game season was likely done as a courtesy, to give those let go a head start on looking for work elsewhere.

The scouting community has been hit hard in the last decade, as the game evolves and more organizations rely more on analytics and video to do the jobs once performed by talent evaluators. And, with no fans allowed for the 60-game season, some other teams have trimmed their already thinning scouting staffs as a way to save money at a time when the game is experiencing huge economic shortfalls.

Finding jobs elsewhere in this environment will not be easy.

It's unclear whether some of the positions eliminated Friday will be re-filled by others, but an industry source said that is still being evaluated.

Even as they were among the first teams to embrace the use of analytics under former GM Theo Epstein, the Red Sox have continued to maintain some of the bigger scouting staffs in the game. In recent years, after it was perceived the Sox had fallen behind when it came to analytics, the organization greatly expanded its staff of analysts but not, as was the case with other organizations, at the expense of the scouting department.

Epstein was insistent that the best way to discover and develop talent was a blend of the two, and that philosophy has largely held sway even after his departure.

The moves come as chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom nears the one-year anniversary of his hiring by the team last October.

Bloom has said previously that he attempted to get to know members of the organization throughout the winter and again, during the pandemic, at which point there were no games to scout or player development to monitor.

Bloom comes from an organization, the Tampa Bay Rays, which prioritized analytics and has been on the cutting edge of a number of trends in the game in recent seasons, including -- but not limited -- to the introduction of the opener, where a reliever begins the game for a team before giving way to a second pitcher who is tasked with providing multiple innings.

But Tampa Bay has also done well to uncover players -- either through the draft or the international free agent market -- and shepherd them to the big leagues. As the prototypical small-market team, the Rays need to constantly replenish the organization with young, controllable and inexpensive talent.

The Red Sox have far greater resources, of course, but Bloom's job is not dissimilar here: to build a steady pipeline of homegrown players to either consistently augment the big league roster or serve as a means for the Sox to trade for more established talent.

The Sox have been a model organization in the last decade when it comes to developing position players. Current stars Xander Bogaerts, Rafael Devers and regulars such as Andrew Benintendi, Christian Vazquez and Jackie Bradley Jr. speak to the team's track record, to say nothing of the since-traded Mookie Betts, one of the game's handful of best players.

But the team has been nowhere near as successful when it comes to developing starting pitching. The Red Sox haven't developed a starting pitcher of any renown since Clay Buchholz. The team's dependence on expensive free agent starting pitching resulted in several years of bloated payrolls and led directly to the rebuild that Bloom is now overseeing.

It's likely that Bloom felt changes were needed in both scouting and player development to affect some changes in the way the Red Sox have discovered and brought along young pitching.