Waving flag with Boston Red Sox professional team logo. Editorial 3D
The Boston Red Sox have finished in last place three of the last four years. As frustration in Beantown nears a boiling point, the disappointing outcome of the Yoshinobu Yamamoto sweepstakes could be the final straw for fans.
Yoshinobu Yamamoto was the ideal free agent. At just 25 years old and with three Sawamura Awards (the NPB equivalent of the Cy Young Award) under his belt, he brought a combination of youth and accomplishment rarely seen on the open market, making him the target of seemingly every big market team this offseason.
For precisely those reasons, Yamamoto looked like the perfect target for a Red Sox organization that finally appears to be coming out on the other side of a long rebuild. Young stars like Triston Casas and Brayan Bello burst onto the scene last season, and the farm system is laden with position player talent in the upper minors.
Significantly, though, there is next to no pitching talent in the pipeline, and many fans pictured Yamamoto stepping in to complete the core that has been slowly coming together for years.
While that core has been building, the Red Sox have preached patience. The fans endured putrid performances in three of the last four years, watching a last-place team in five seasons over the past decade. However, the promise of a rising farm system and yet another change at the top of the baseball operations department (the team’s eighth since the turn of the century) provide at least some reason for optimism.
