Even after being met with a cacophony of boos at Winter Weekend, the Red Sox’s fan festival, the front office is continuing its offseason plan with conviction.
When management greeted the media before Winter Weekend’s welcome event, CEO Sam Kennedy stated that the 2024 payroll will likely be less than that of 2023. Boston did not crack the first luxury tax threshold last year, and there’s nothing to suggest the team plans to do so this year.
But Red Sox fans are begging the front office to spend money, and they have a reason to equate spending money with success for the club. The Red Sox had the highest-paid roster in the league in 2018 at $241 million, and the 2018 Sox were one of the most successful baseball teams of all time. Whenever the front office claims that spending excess amounts of money doesn’t work, fans don’t want to hear it.
Owner John Henry pivoted to a money-saving model seemingly as soon as he put the 2018 World Series trophy down for the last time. He traded Mookie Betts in one of the worst moves in MLB’s recent memory just to save himself some cash. Since that trade, Xander Bogaerts has also left Boston — another casualty to Henry’s penny-pinching.
