Sox Offseason Wish List Needs to Extend Past New Manager

With John Farrell out the door one year to late for the sox to make the easy in house upgrade to Torey Lovullo, they have to look elsewhere for someone to take the helm.  The lead candidates seem to be Alex Cora due to his experience in Boston and success as the Astros Bench Coach, Ron Gardenhire who had success as the manager of the Twins and recently the Diamondbacks Bench Coach, and Brad Ausmus basically because Dombrowski hired him before when he was with the Tigers and he sucked.

The hunt for a manager is definetly priority number one for Dave Dombrowski especially since he will probably want the future manager’s input on filling holes on this team.  The two biggest of which are the lack of  power in the offense and the leadership vacuum left by David Ortiz.  The offensive problems can be seen by the numbers, the sox scored 93 fewer runs and 40 less home runs.  The leadership problem might not be present on the stat sheet but anyone who payed attention to the news surrounding this team.  Prices war against the media, players getting sensitive about the commentary, and an overall negative aura around the team.

As far as the offense goes the most popular remedy that is being tossed around is Eric Hosmer.  With Mitch Moreland’s one year contract up the Sox have a spot to fill at first.  Hosmer might not be much of a power hitter racking only 25 homers in each of the last two seasons but he has hit in 93 and 104 runners in 2017 and 2016 to go along with those homers and would be a substantial improvement over Moreland.  The downside is the Royals have an interest in keeping Hosmer and the Yankees have shown interest as well.  Hosmer’s agent just happens to be Scott Boras so if you want Hosmer you’re going to have to pay huge money for him.  Other possibilities include Hosmer’s teammate Mike Moustakas who just bashed a career high 38 homers and you could platoon him between first and third if you resign Moreland.

The leadership role is harder to nail down until the Sox decide on a manager as they will likely try to bring in a role player depth guy who they know can bring the clubhouse together.  With the current top players like Pedroia, Price and Hanley either being incapable or unwilling to lead this team some character guys have to be brought in to help bring together the talent.

Written by Jason MacKinnon (@oohkillemjason)