Red Sox fans were not thrilled with the trade deadline

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.

Red Sox fans not thrilled with the trade deadline

This past week’s Fanpulse surveys that went to fans around the league focused on the trade deadline and how fans felt about their team’s activity. Or more accurately with respect to Red Sox fans, lack of activity. We are now a little less than two weeks removed from that deadline at which the Red Sox did nothing, and since then the team has basically tanked. So, how do we feel about the decision to not make any additions by July 31 (Andrew Cashner notwithstanding, which is probably unfair but that’s how we generally look at these things!)? Not great!

I’ve talked about this before, but there are two ways of looking at the lack of trade deadline activity and the subsequent tanking from the Red Sox. On the one hand, one could look at how the team has essentially fallen out of the playoff race since that decision and say it proves Dave Dombrowski’s right. One could argue that Dombrowski was right not to invest in this team because they were never going anywhere and they are proving that right now before our eyes. One could counterargue that the team was playing well before the deadline and the lack of confidence in them shown by their front office resulted in their poor play. We’ve heard for years about teams getting an addition at the deadline and that confidence boost leading to big runs over the final two months of the year. This would be the reverse of that.

Ultimately, I don’t have a clue which is right or if it’s some mixture of both. It’s probably some mixture of both, because that’s generally the case with these kinds of binaries. That said, if you hold one opinion or the other it’s not hard to argue in its favor. As it turns out, whatever they think about this chicken-or-egg problem, the majority of fans who responded to our poll weren’t crazy about the lack of activity.

As for the normal questions, you can probably guess how those went. Confidence in the direction of the team is plummeting and Alex Cora is getting less of the benefit of the doubt. Confidence in the team is down to four (4!) percent, which actually isn’t the lowest! Pirates fans have given a zero percent confidence rating. Alex Cora’s isn’t that bad, but it’s down to 48 percent.

Who’s the best?

Well, uh, this one was close. I don’t think there’s any doubt the Astros are the best team in baseball right now on paper. That is not to say they are guaranteed to win a World Series or anything like that, but come on. It’s actually wild that 18 percent of fans didn’t vote for Houston.