Baseball executives have to make tough decisions all the time. They come in all forms, at all times of the year.
Buy or sell at the trade deadline? Extend a player's contract or not? Make a managerial change or stay the course? Those calls come with the territory.
Now, Red Sox chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom has another challenge staring him in the face. With his Red Sox occupying the basement of the American League East and, after Saturday's 3-1 loss to the White Sox, a full 9.5 games out of first place in the division, how does he respond to what he's seen?
Does he remain patient, in the belief that there are too many good hitters on the roster he's resembled for the team to scuffle offensively much longer? As difficult as it is, does he dismiss the first month as a relatively small sample size and stay the course? Or does he make wholesale changes to the roster at a time of year when such changes are difficult to make.
Suffice to say, this isn't what Bloom expected at the start of the season. Some hiccups? Sure. Some problems with the bullpen early as roles were established? Perhaps.
But the Sox rank near the bottom in virtually every offensive category and few saw that coming down the tracks.
"Probably offensively (has been the biggest disappointment),'' said Bloom. "We all thought -- and still do think -- that that's going to be a strength. It just hasn't been there on a consistent basis yet. I think one of the things we've been going through is, it's really been (under-performance) up and down the lineup. Obviously, it hasn't been every single person. But there's a lot of guys who are not performing like they expect, and we expect, so I don't know that you could circle any one spot or even a couple of spots. That's been part of the issue -- it's really been across the board.''
In theory, the one thing Bloom could do to address the team's failings would be to execute a trade or two. The problem is, it takes two to trade and most teams are still in the process of evaluating what they have on hand. And when they're not focused on their own evaluations, they've preparing for the amateur draft.
That makes finding a trade partner problematic.
"I think we should be open to making trades at any point if it's something that helps the organization,'' said Bloom. "Typically, it's easier to do those at times of the year when all 30 teams are talking. But I would say, almost always, there's at least some sort of conversation that you're having with at least one team. Different teams are in different places with this.
"I do think that if you're making a decision solely in response to what's happened in the first 30 days of the season, more often than not you're opening yourself up to doing something you'll regret. There's a lot of examples of that. You don't have to go too far back. You can look at it last year when a couple of guys who struggled mightily out of the gate (presumably: Bobby Dalbec and Kike Hernandez). Obviously, our group as a whole was doing better. But those guys became massive contributors the rest of the way and we would have been really poorly served by panicking and giving up on them early.
"Conversely, we've got guys here and some of the best moves that I've been a part of in my career have been acquiring players that we believe in that went through struggles that were a heck of a lot longer than just a month. But if the ingredients are there and you believe in them, then it's worth giving them some runway. That doesn't mean that everything that's happened is going to flip and all these guys who are struggling are going to be great the rest of the way. But as much as I think we should be open (to ideas) and we should be willing to do business at any point, we need to be careful being too reactive to a month of baseball and doing something we'll regret.''
On the other hand, as Bloom spoke in the Red Sox dugout, he couldn't help but see the left-field scoreboard and standings that showed the Sox behind even Baltimore and 11 games behind in the loss column to first-place New York. That's not theoretical; that's reality.
"We've dug ourselves a hole, no question,'' Bloom conceded. "We haven't played well. (But) panic's not going to help. We have to play better. We put ourselves in this situation. But if we're going to get out of it, we're going to do it by doing those things we know we can do well. There's a difference between urgency and panic. We certainly need to show more urgency that we hoped we would be feeling at this point in the season. But this game isn't going to reward panic.''
And yet, some fans believe it's time to do something drastic. In two weeks, a quarter of the schedule will be complete. That may not represent any traditional milepost -- although Memorial Day itself is often cited as a logical time for assessment -- but it's not an insignificant chunk of the season, either.
What can be gleaned over the next few weeks is the answer to a nagging question: Is this merely under-performance in the short term? Or have the Red Sox badly miscalculated about what they have on hand?
"Obviously, time is going to prove that out,'' Bloom said. "I think everybody felt, coming into the season, that -- understanding that we don't and didn't say we have a perfect team -- we had a very good team that could compete to go to the postseason and win a championship. We still feel that way. Obviously, we'll see how that proves out and how it goes.
But from my standpoint, we are where we are. We're constantly evaluating, we're constantly assessing the decisions that we made and then the decisions that could be in front of us. We try to do the best we can with all the information we have. We constantly try to learn and we're constantly working together to try to put guys in position to succeed and if somebody's not performing the way we think they can or the way they think they can, it's on us to try to change that and get better.''
As disappointed as he's been with what he's seen, Bloom is trying to maintain the organization's equilibrium and not give in to the temptation to overreact.
"This is a very humbling business,'' he said. "If you ever think you have it figured out, the game will immediately prove you wrong. I'm surprised (at what's taken place). But especially in a month of baseball, you can see a lot of different things. When you aren't going well, it looks like it will never end. And then you could flip a switch and go on a hot streak where you think it's never going to lose again. And the reality is, it's always somewhere in-between.''
In time, if things don't improve considerably, Bloom may face some bigger, tougher choices: to wit, whether to blow up the team as the deadline. Such a call might involve selling off a number of the team's free-agents-to-be: Kike Hernandez, Nathan Eovaldi, Xander Bogaerts, Christian Vazquez and J.D. Martinez
Such a move would be pretty drastic and represent a white flag for the final two months of the season. Attendance, TV ratings and sponsorships would all suffer -- now and into next season.
It's a step not to be taken lightly, and to date, Bloom isn't ready to resort to the nuclear option.
"You don't want to do things out of desperation or to shake things up,'' he said. "That's usually not a recipe for winning, if you get away from your strengths and get away from what you know.''
For now, then, he waits.
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One under-publicized aspect of the Red Sox' early offensive struggles is the inability for someone to regularly get on base from the leadoff spot.
Heading into Saturday, the Red Sox were ranked 27th in on-base percentage (.281) from the leadoff spot in their batting order. When it comes to batting average (.182) were 26th of 30 teams, and in OPS, they were 22nd at .599.
Is any wonder that the team hasn't been able to generate much? The three hitters who've been the most consistent in the lineup -- Rafael Devers, Xander Bogaerts and J.D. Martinez -- haven't had a lot of opportunities to drive in runs because far more often than not, the hitters directly in front of them aren't getting on base.
The problem extends to the bottom of the order, where the Sox are also experiencing little offensive production. But the problem is more pronounced at the top, where it was expected that there would be more runners in scoring position for the run producers.
Kike Hernandez began the year in the top spot, having had success in the No. 1 spot in the second half of last year. But after a brief stretch in the second week of the season where he was knocking doubles around the ballpark, Hernandez has been mired in a long slump. While he was hitting leadoff, he put together a slash line of .164/.246/.327.
After a few weeks, Alex Cora saw enough and made a change, elevating Trevor Story to the top. That, too, has failed to kick-start things with a line .196/.298/.294.
It's a sad commentary that the Sox have felt compelled to keep Story there because his OBP is encroaching on .300 -- about 50 points lower than what's expected from a quality leadoff hitter.
In Cora's defense, it's not as if there are a lot of other options. About the only one that would make sense would be to try Bogaerts there. Bogaerts has a good sense of the strike zone -- career OBP: .354 -- and could serve as a nice tone-setter at the top of the order.
However, as with most of these cases, there's a price to be paid. Placing Bogaerts in the leadoff spot would take away a run-producing bat in the third or fourth spot in the lineup. And given how poorly the bottom third of the order has been, Bogaerts would often be coming up with the bases empty.
Like nearly everything else that's gone wrong for the Sox in their first month of play, this is one more problem they didn't anticipate having. It seemed Hernandez had established himself as the perfect modern-day leadoff man, with decent on-base skills and the ability to drive the ball consistently enough for extra bases, providing the "dynamic'' quality at the top of the order.
And maybe Hernandez will, like a year ago, fix things and claim the top spot as his own.
For now, it remains another issue on a long list of problems.