Matt Dermody situation further calls Bloom's leadership into question
There's a moment in Fargo, perhaps the greatest movie ever made, that applies to the way the Red Sox have handled this Matt Dermody stupidity.
Frances McDormand's pregnant cop, Marge, has just responded to a snowy highway murder scene, and her dimwitted partner doesn't realize that the "DLR" on the suspect's license plate actually stands for "dealer."
"I'm not sure that I agree with you 100 percent on your police work," she gently scolds.
The Red Sox apparently employed the same kind of investigative techniques not only when they signed Dermody out of Japan this winter, but especially after they became aware of a deleted homophobic tweet from 2021.
Chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom told MassLive that the Red Sox investigated the matter and emerged satisfied with Dermody's explanation that the tweet was an ill-considered one-off he immediately regretted. What's much harder to explain is how they missed everything else that he left up, including a response only five days ago defending his use of the N-word 12 years earlier.
"Song lyrics," he wrote when someone complained. "Juicy by notorious big."
It only takes five minutes of scrolling through Dermody's Twitter posts, likes, retweets, and replies to see vaccine denialism, anti-trans sentiments, sympathy for Jan. 6 criminals, and QAnon-inspired conspiracy theories.
Dermody is free to fester in his own ignorance, and he's hardly worth another sentence, especially considering his marginal ability. What's far more concerning is what his presence says about the Red Sox decision-makers and the rigorousness of their so-called "processes" that they could miss something so obvious.
If the Red Sox can't adequately vet a public Twitter account after a player has already been credibly accused of homophobia, why should we trust their methods of scouting, spending, and evaluation? Embracing Bloom's vision requires a willful ignorance what's happening on the field (Update: it's not good) and believing wholly in the promise of the future. Whiffing on something so basic erodes our trust in anything that's happening under the hood, whether it's hiring a million analysts or building out the team's medical and technological departments.
Bloom told The Boston Globe on Wednesday that he regretted his handling of the situation and the pain that it caused, particularly his suggestion that Dermody hadn't realized his words were hurtful, even though those words were effectively, "All gays are going to hell."
What's much tougher to justify is how the club could miss the rest of the problematic content in the left-hander's Twitter feed alone.
"We pride ourselves on doing the right due diligence so that we can have the right conversations around these things," Bloom told the Globe. "We realized as this was unfolding [after the callup] that a process that is normally pretty robust missed some things. There were other concerning things on social media. We usually don't miss these types of things. In this case we did."
Bloom's critics hardly need more ammunition than the standings, with the defensively challenged, largely anonymous roster falling two games under .500 and further into last place on Tuesday with its eighth loss in 11 games. Since reaching a high-water mark of 21-14 in May, the Red Sox are just 12-21 and have lost series to the Cardinals, Angels, Reds, Rays, Guardians, and now Rockies. Tampa is the only one of those clubs that would currently be in the playoffs.
To add off-field embarrassments to that ledger is the kind of misstep that shifts the difficult decision of whether to undertake another organizational shakeup from the column marked "possible" towards the one labeled "inevitable."
As fans lose faith in the front office's vision, blatantly self-inflicted wounds certainly don't help. Change won't happen until owner John Henry deems the cause lost, but if that day comes, Bloom will have no one to blame but himself for the shoddy police work that triggered his downfall.
