Red Sox fire chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom after four seasons

The Boston Red Sox fired chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom on Thursday, as the team stumbled toward a third last-place finish in four MLB seasons.

The team made the announcement before the start of a doubleheader against the New York Yankees, which took the first two games of the series to drop Boston into a tie for last.

Bloom was hired from the Tampa Bay Rays in 2019 to help revive the farm system and bring financial stability to a team that was one of baseball's biggest spenders. One of his first actions was to trade 2018 American League MVP Mookie Betts, on a mandate from ownership to get the payroll in order.

The team said general manager Brian O'Halloran "has been offered a new senior leadership position within the baseball operations department."

O'Halloran will run the department in the interim, along with assistant general managers Eddie Romero, Raquel Ferreira and Michael Groopman.

After going 86 years without a World Series championship, the Red Sox have won four since 2004, the most for any team this century.

But they've done it with three different baseball bosses — Theo Epstein (2004, 2007), Ben Cherington (2013) and Dave Dombrowski (2018) — as they try to avoid the roller coaster ride that has also seen them finish last in the AL East five times since 2012.

Reporting by The Associated Press.