Confidence starting to fall again among Red Sox fans

Welcome to SB Nation FanPulse, a survey of fans across MLB. Each week, we send 30 polls to plugged in fans from each team. Red Sox fans, sign up HERE to join FanPulse.

Confidence is falling. Again

We have been doing these polls in which we seek out a simple yes or no from Red Sox fans regarding whether or not they are confident in the team’s direction for ten weeks now. Things had been trending back up for a little while now after a crash early in the year, but now things are dipping again. The results aren’t even as low as one would expect, either, since this poll went out before the last few games where things have really gone downhill. Still, the confidence in the team is at 83 percent right now, which is the lowest point since Week 7 and the lowest rate of confidence in all of baseball.

It’s not just the team in general that is seeing a drop in confidence. The confidence in Alex Cora is starting to drop again, too. Granted, we’re not talking about a level of confidence that reflects a desire to see a new man in charge, but confidence in Cora fell down to 83 percent in the latest polling. Same as the confidence in the team! That is the lowest rate of confidence for Cora since Week 6 and the third lowest rate of confidence all year. He is tied with Aaron Boone for the lowest mark in the division.

Fans want the MLB Draft to expand

One of the biggest developing stories in baseball is the likelihood of an international draft being added to the league schedule at some point in the near future. The Players Association has been pushing against this for years, but the league has made it a priority and it seems more a question of when, not if. In our latest poll, we found that a large majority of our respondents want international players to be part of the amateur draft, which is just a few days away. I understand some of the reasons for this, the most compelling to me being the possibility of stripping away the corruption and scandal in Latin American baseball right now. Of course, drafts are also a way of suppressing agency for amateur players, taking away a free market (which has already been stripped with a hard cap in this market) as well as their choice of organization. Ultimately, I don’t want to see a draft but I’m starting to resign myself to the fact that it’s going to happen at some point relatively soon.