McAdam: Outfield hasn't produced yet, but Bloom willing to be patient

Chaim Bloom hasn't been in baseball forever, but he's been around long enough to know that it's never wise to overreact.

So even as the Red Sox began their homestand Tuesday in first place in the American League East, Bloom is not about to fall into the trap of overrating his team for its play in the first month of the season. At the same time, he's not blind to some weaknesses that have become apparent, even in the face of a generally positive first 29 games.

The Sox are neither as good as they may have appeared in stretches, nor as troubled as they seem in dropping three-of-four in Texas over the weekend. The truth, as it often does, lies somewhere in the middle and will guide Bloom accordingly.

One glaring issue for the club has been the almost total lack of production they've received from two corner outfielders, Franchy Cordero and Hunter Renfroe. But Bloom indicated a willingness to be somewhat patient and wait for both players to come around.

"Obviously, it's not ideal,'' he conceded of their starts. "It is still early. I think it's important to remember that a week into the season, you look at Franchy and he was hitting .350 and obviously now he's not. He's had a really rough few weeks. The game both these guys play, I don't necessarily know that you'd expect either of them to come out and hit for a high average. You do expect them to be productive in other ways, and so far, we've seen that in spurts but we haven't seen that consistently.

"All the physical abilities are there to do it. We want to give them as much runway as we can. That's why you want to have different options for the manager, so there's ways he can put guys in different positions to succeed and if someone needs to go and work on something and try to get in a better pace, to try to be able to stay away from them for a couple of days, and do that. We know the ability is there. It's been frustrating that it hasn't showed up as consistently as we'd like. But we don't feel any differently about the potential those guys have to impact us.''

The Sox understood that with Cordero in particular, strikeouts were part of the equation. But they've come at such a rate (nearly 42 percent of his plate appearances) that they're not at all sustainable. The Sox thought they had seen him improve with a two-strike approach while scouting him last summer, but there's been little evidence of that in recent weeks.

"We need to help him get (the strikeout rate) back under control so that he can get to his power,'' Bloom said.

To date, without much coming from the bottom of the lineup, the Red Sox have largely been dependent on four players -- Alex Verdugo, J.D. Martinez, Xander Bogaerts and Rafael Devers -- to produce what's been the highest-scoring offense in the league. But relying on four players to carry the team is probably asking too much.

"I think it's unlikely that you'll see the parts of our lineup that haven't been productive be that unproductive going forward,'' he said, "and you may see some of our horses that have carried us so far go through the inevitable slumps that happen during a season. We talked about wanting to build a lineup that, although we had some star power in the middle of the lineup, could be a threat 1-9. It hasn't played out that way in terms of the production.''

Tuesday represented the start of the 2021 minor league seasons, and the Sox will be carefully monitoring all their prospects. But any hope that the Sox might be willing to promote outfielder Jarren Duran and give him some playing time over, say, Cordero, was dashed by Bloom's more measured expectations.

"I think he's going to tell us when he's ready by how he's doing,'' Bloom said. "There's value in what he's about to go out and do -- to be able to go out and work on his new swing and his new approach that we haven't seen tested in affiliated ball and take that out against Triple-A competition. And then also for him to continue his progression in the outfield. So I think we're going to learn a lot. We want to make sure we don't try to learn too much from a really small sample.

"But just having him go through the ups and downs of a season, and playing him every day, we're going to learn a lot quickly. At the end of the day, it's up to the player. We have every confidence that Jarren's going to go out and knock that door down. But he'll tell us when he's ready.''

As for making a deal to upgrade the outfield, Bloom didn't sound terribly optimistic, given that it's rare for teams to make deals before June. Everyone is still in the business of evaluating what they have on hand, and thus, unlikely to do any selling-off.

"This is a time period where it's rare to see significant action,'' he said. "And we know that these (unusual) seasons are going to take their toll on teams' depth. And so, teams, more than usual, are going to be in a mode of just trying to hoard as many guys as they can to get them through it ... I think it's going to be a while before the serious talks pick up.''