Tommy Pham, Boston Red Sox. (Photo by Sarah Stier/Getty Images)
The Boston Red Sox haven’t started off the 2023 season strong but a few former players clearly wouldn’t have helped with how they’ve played on new teams.
The Boston Red Sox haven’t had as bad of a start to the 2023 MLB season as some expected them to have. Even though the club sits at the bottom of the AL East entering the weekend, the club is just a single game below .500. In fact, if they were in the AL Central or NL West, they would be within three games of first place in the division.
Still, with players hopefully getting healthier and returning to the roster as the season goes on, the Red Sox still have hope for what this season can be. There will be plenty of people who question how Chaim Bloom handled the offseason, to be sure and rightfully so, but the team is still better than some imagined they’d be.
And to Bloom’s credit, several former Red Sox who could’ve been re-signed or returned to Boston this season were actually smart moves to not bring back given how badly they’ve been performing on their new teams.
Red Sox: 3 former players failing miserably on new teams
3. Tommy Pham has been a net negative for the Mets this season
After being dealt to Boston at the trade deadline a year ago, Tommy Pham landed on the Red Sox, trying to give the team a puncher’s chance at a possible late playoff push. That, of course, didn’t remotely happen. But Pham was ultimately solid playing his home games at Fenway, posting a .672 OPS but hitting six home runs and 12 doubles with 24 RBI over just 53 games.
With the Red Sox adding Masataka Yoshida and Adam Duvall this offseason, though, they were happy to let Pham walk in free agency, and he eventually was signed by the Mets.
Pham hasn’t been an everyday outfielder for the Mets, to be sure, playing in just 19 of the team’s first 27 games. But if he was trying to make a case to be an everyday player in New York, he’s doing an extremely poor job of it.
Over those 19 appearances, Pham is slashing just .196/.283/.348 for the Mets with strikeouts in more than a quarter of his at-bats to this point (12 out of 46). He does have two home runs and seven RBI but the fact of the matter is that a player who is not a great overall glove in the outfield is now hitting below the Mendoza Line.
Suffice it to say, hanging onto Pham if this was what he was going to do in the 2023 season wouldn’t have done anything to help the Red Sox cause.