The Red Sox are awful. What should they do?

It wouldn’t be a bad Red Sox season without a dumb story. Pablo Sandoval using Instagram on the toilet during a game is a dumb, perfectly applicable story for the 2015 Red Sox. Is it a metaphor? Probably not, considering that smartphones and toilets are the peanut butter and jelly of today, and nothing the Red Sox have done this year has been nearly that elegant. It’s just a dumb story for a dumb season.

The Red Sox are having a very, very dumb season.

Three months ago, they were favorites. They were coming off a busy, effective offseason, and they found beefy hitters to fill a lineup that was already overstuffed with prospects and young talent. The 2014 Red Sox weren’t much of a surprise, but this year’s team caught me totally asleep. They looked to be set up for the present. They looked to be set up for the future. They were still going to have flexibility to add more pieces at the deadline.

Instead, 10 games under .500, nine games back, and a dumb controversy. There’s still time for a miracle run, of course, considering there’s still a lot of talent buried under there, but let’s approach this as if the Red Sox are too far gone to come back this season. What now?

It’s not like the Red Sox are going to rebuild, necessarily, but they’re likely to start planning for 2016 soon. Except, this is a weird-as-heck team made up of three disparate parts:

The Red Sox would probably love to sell you a Pablo Sandoval right now. Hey, he’s gregarious, jolly, fun at parties ... really, they’ll even throw in a million or two at this point. Other teams just might not be interested¹. The Red Sox would also be interested in trading you a very expensive 31-year-old left fielder who isn’t really a left fielder, and he would come at the low price of just a few prospects and, okay, I guess that’s a dial tone. Mike Napoli is expensive and not hitting. Justin Masterson and Wade Miley have been awful.

Then there are the veterans they won’t trade. Dustin Pedroia’s extension hasn’t even started yet, but there’s no way the Red Sox would even consider dealing the spunky little fella. Heart of the team, he is. David Ortiz says he wouldn’t accept a trade, but that’s okay, the Red Sox probably weren’t going to trade him anyway. Clay Buchholz has two reasonable club options, so he could fetch a little bit, but considering one of the problems the Red Sox are having has to do with their inconsistent pitching, that’s not the kind of player they would deal if they’re looking to contend next year, which they certainly are.

Finally, there are the youngsters they have no reason to trade. The roster is littered with them, Blake Swihart, Xander Bogaerts, Mookie Betts, Eduardo Rodriguez, the pile of prospects in the minors ... none of those guys are going anywhere.

The Red Sox are an empty store with dented cans on the shelves and all sorts of awesome things in the locked room in the back. Like, rocket frogs and laser ferrets, things you really, really want to get your hands on but can’t. Maybe they can pay enough of Napoli’s remaining salary to make him a reasonable option for a gambling team in need of power. Maybe another team will really be into Alexi Ogando. But you get the concept: What the Red Sox have that other teams want, they aren’t selling. What the Red Sox want to sell, other teams don’t want.

In the meantime, the Red Sox will probably mix their better prospects in the upper minors into the roster, figuring out who might be ready to help next season. Fun stuff for the fans paying close attention, but nothing explosive. The deadline will come and go with a few minor moves, and the roster at the end of September will probably look a great deal like the one right now.

In which I reveal the Grand Strategy of the Red Sox moving forward. It’s one part Moneyball, one part Billy Ball, two parts neo-Sabeanism, and a lot of moving pieces. Here goes:

The players who aren’t playing well right now should play better.

Really, that should be the plan. That probably will be the plan, with free-agent additions brought in to reinforce the roster. Hey, Hanley, start hitting more. Hey, Pablo start hitting and stop being a bozo in the field. Looking good, Xander and Mookie, but if you could develop in front of our eyes, that’d be ducky. It would also be nice if every one of the starting pitchers acquired in the offseason could remember how to pitch, especially the one with the pricey extension.

That’s it. The need-an-ace concerns of the offseason were a little overblown, but the underlying truth that the Red Sox could use more reliable pitchers is still valid, and they’ll probably work diligently on that in a few months. Until then, the best course is probably to assume that the universe burped, and the previously talented players will be talented in the future, where they’ll be joined by youngsters who made the transition from prospect to above-average regular.

My guess for the rest of the season is that things will get better, and the “hey, dummies, play better” strategy will look like a plausible one for 2016. There’s too much talent on this team to finish with a winning percentage hovering around .400, but it’s probably too late for them to climb out of the pit they’ve dug with iffy pitchers and very, very expensive hitters. It’s not a sexy solution, and it’s not going to blow up talk radio, but the best strategy for the Red Sox just might be to wait around for good things to happen.

¹ On the unwritten rules of Pablo phone-pooping during a game: The transgression gets a 3 if he really had to go and he grabbed a phone because, hey, that’s what you’re supposed to do, you animals. It’s a 9 if he used the bathroom as an excuse to get away from the game and screw around on his phone, because that would be awful-teammate territory. Thank you for your time.

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