Did Red Sox Coaches Use Roman Anthony As A Prop To Send Message To Front Office?

Any Major League Baseball team that trades its most productive hitter can safely be assumed to have some problems.

In most cases, those problems would tend to be on the field. A team is struggling, they know they're going to lose that player in free agency, so they trade him to get some prospects back. But the Boston Red Sox traded Rafael Devers in win-now mode while on a five-game winning streak.

To say the Red Sox appear dysfunctional to an outsider is to understate things dramatically. The players aren't on the same page as the front office, and neither are the coaches. And one damning report from Monday showed just how deep the dysfunction runs.

Joon Lee of Yahoo Sports wrote an expose detailing several examples of how the Red Sox's front office has become a haven of internal conflict, and included a disheartening nugget about the organization's treatment of number-one prospect Roman Anthony.

According to Lee's sources, Anthony doing outfield drills on the field before his second major league game was believed to be a message to the front office that the organization wasn't drilling the fundamentals into its young players hard enough before they arrived in the majors.

"Another error came during Roman Anthony’s debut, when he misplayed a ball in right field. The next day, Anthony was sent out to run outfield drills in front of the media," Lee wrote.

"Multiple people in the organization noted that under previous regimes, that kind of instruction would’ve taken place behind closed doors. This time, it felt like a message from the coaching staff to the front office. One team source described the message as deliberate: 'This is what we still have to teach, at the big-league level.'”

After adding the usual qualifiers of "if this was the true intention," etc., etc., a well-functioning baseball franchise simply does not have things like this happen. Anthony is the number-one prospect in all of baseball, but in this case, he appears to have been reduced to a paper soldier in a proxy war between coaching staff and front office.

What if Anthony being filmed doing basic outfield drills had rattled his confidence? He got his first major league hit later that night, but he doesn't have one since.

Plus, the fact that he made an error in his first game can be chalked up in part to the fact that he was playing out of his usual position, something the coaching staff and front office can split the blame for.

A season that started out with a lot of promise is becoming part soap opera, part political theater, and part horror movie (see: the Red Sox's defense as a whole). Maybe Devers is lucky to be elsewhere.