On paper, the Red Sox look like an organization nearing the light at the end of Rebuild Tunnel.

They extricated themselves from their long-term financial commitments of the late 2010s, reset their luxury tax penalties, and their farm system is ranked as favorably as No. 2 (FanGraphs) or No. 5 (Baseball America). In other words, the Red Sox are playing with their most stacked deck in almost a decade. So, is 2024 the year they reestablish themselves as a force with whom to be reckoned?

Two 2004 World Series champions don’t think they’re quite there yet.

“Well, I love ‘em,” Derek Lowe told the Herald by phone on Tuesday. “But I think you’d love to add a few more starting pitchers, to be honest.”

Lowe and Kevin Millar are among the celebrity players in this week’s Hilton Grand Vacations Tournament of Champions golf extravaganza. They’re also two of several former Red Sox players with deep, ongoing ties to the organization: Lowe lives in Fort Myers, and is looking forward to working with the pitchers when spring training begins next month, Millar serves as an analyst for NESN and MLB Network. Twenty years after their historic ’04 season, they still care deeply about what’s going on with the Red Sox.

“Give ‘em time,” Lowe advised. “Offseason’s not over. Hopefully they’ll get some starting pitching, and away we go.”

Yet in Millar’s view, the Red Sox are further away from seriously competing. “The bottom line is you got to build a farm system,” he said. “There’s a draft in June every year, you can’t miss on that. And I think at the end of the day, (Craig) Breslow, it’ll take a couple years. It took Theo (Epstein) a couple years with the Chicago Cubs, people forget about that. But you rebuild, and then boom, you make a splash.”

Whether the farm system is built up enough or not, the Red Sox haven’t been spending money and the prevailing assumption is that they’ll remain on this path. Lowe’s and Millar’s hedging happened to coincide with Craig Breslow opening up about the offseason and team priorities.

“That’s a fair question,” Breslow told Pete Abraham on Tuesday when the Boston Globe reporter asked if Breslow believes ownership is still committed to serious competition. “Through the conversations I’ve had with ownership, they absolutely are still supportive of assembling a World Series team as quickly as we possible can.”

However, the new chief baseball officer indicated that the Red Sox will rely on in-house development to get back in the game, not spending.

“But I think the reality is that it’s going to require a step forward from the young position players,” Breslow said. “It’s going to require the build-out of a talent pipeline of arms that we can acquire, we draft and we can develop internally. And it’s going to require aggressive player development in the minor leagues and the major leagues so guys that we think are the next wave – (Marcelo) Mayer and (Roman) Anthony and (Kyle) Teel, that group – are not just big leaguers, but impact big leaguers. The convergence of all of those pieces is the fastest path to a World Series team… We want to build this thing in a way that there’s not just quality once in a while, but there’s quality paired with consistency.”

Plenty of teams are having a quiet offseason, thanks in part to the combination of a thin starting pitching market and high demand. And though the Red Sox also haven’t been as aggressive as they could be, it makes sense that Breslow isn’t willing to mortgage the burgeoning rebuild just to make a mid-size splash.

However, teams that are serious about contending must be willing to mortgage a potentially bright, but unpredictable future so as not to waste a present opportunity; winning, by definition, requires losing. In this day and age, it’s almost impossible to rely solely on the farm system when the Dodgers are giving Shohei Ohtani $700 million and the Yankees traded for Juan Soto. The Red Sox ranked 10th in the American League in home runs last season and so far have yet to re-sign or replace free agents Adam Duvall and Justin Turner; there’s no two prospects who are ready to come up and replace their bat power.

Above all, what doesn’t make sense is the lack of transparency surrounding priorities. It’s one thing to keep their offseason strategy close to the vest, another entirely to repeatedly mislead one’s paying customers, giving them false hope in the form of empty phrases such as “top priority” and “full throttle.” The Red Sox have become Lucy yanking the football away from Charlie Brown at the last second over and over again. It’s not only wholly unnecessary, but insulting to fans who are simply holding the Red Sox to the high standard set by ownership for most of their first two decades at the helm.

“Fans sometimes get a little cranky,” Millar said, “but it has been a rough couple of years.”

Some of that roughness might’ve been avoided, though, with a bit more openness.