BOSTON — After he said good morning. After he thanked his family, the Red Sox ownership, and his baseball mentors. After he talked about his first-hand experience cheering for the Red Sox, playing for the Red Sox, and winning a championship with the Red Sox.
When Craig Breslow got around to talking about his actual job, the 46th word the new Red Sox chief baseball officer said on Thursday was “sustainable.” He described his vision for the organization as “an efficient and effective baseball operation.” He talked about “optimization” and “synthesizing analytical information.”
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He mentioned “making sure that we’re not leaving wins on the table.”
He sounded a whole lot like the other guy who just got fired.
As the Red Sox presented their new head of baseball operations, the broad strokes of the introductory press conference were remarkably similar to the message four years ago when they announced Breslow’s predecessor, Chaim Bloom.
“At the end of the day, scoring runs and preventing runs is always going to be the name of the game,” Breslow said. “I think when you tether yourself to a singular approach you lose opportunities to create competitive advantages.”
Or, to put it another way.
“A lot of our responsibility as a group is going to be to be creative and to figure out how many potential paths we can construct to reach all of our goals,” Bloom said on the day he was hired in 2019. “The more options you have, the better choices you’re going to be able to make. That’s a lot of our job.”
So, what’s the difference, from one Yale-educated, first-time-baseball-ops-leader to another? Philosophically, people inside the organization acknowledge there’s more that unites Bloom and Breslow than separates them. In many ways, that’s by design. The Red Sox didn’t dislike Bloom’s approach. They don’t think he’s bad at running a baseball team. The hope is that Breslow will execute similar philosophies with a better balance of long-term growth with short-term opportunity. The Red Sox want all of Bloom’s big-picture thinking, with more in-the-moment winning.
“I don’t want to say much about the comparison,” Red Sox chairman Tom Werner said. “It was a very difficult decision to move on from Chaim. He’s a very talented person. The system is much stronger than the one he inherited. But I think that Craig has certain assets that we all have seen today that make him the person to help us go forward.”
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What are those assets? Team president Sam Kennedy said there were three specific reasons the Red Sox settled on Breslow as their new leader of baseball operations.
1. “His unmatched clarity of vision.”
Back-to-back losing seasons cost Bloom his job, but the Red Sox are once again casting themselves as a team on the precipice of contention. Ownership has suggested it’s financially committed to once again spending near the top of the league, a message that’s not only been broadcast in public but apparently in private as well.
“I don’t see financial resources as a limiting factor,” Breslow said.
That hasn’t always been the case the past four years, and it especially wasn’t the case this past season when the Red Sox cut payroll below the luxury tax threshold. But that was Bloom’s problem. His vision was one of growth and patience, which ownership seemed to like until it cost them in the standings and in the public narrative.
A freshly motivated ownership with money to spend now that luxury tax penalties are reset should be Breslow’s good fortune, and Kennedy said the group was impressed by Breslow’s “plans that he articulated for player acquisition, player development, and ultimately, player performance at every level of the organization.”
While much of Bloom’s job was to rebuild while still trying to win, Breslow’s immediate directive is to win. Whether that manifests itself in attempts to sign impact free agents or via trades from an improved farm system remains to be seen, but Breslow acknowledged a strong core of position players, an obvious need for pitching, and a farm system on the rise.
“I think there are a lot of really exciting players here,” Breslow said. “I also know that part of building a consistent winner at the major league level is making a lot of bold, difficult decisions, and some of those include (making moves with) favorite players, and some of those include leveraging prospect capital to enhance your major-league team.”
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2. “His baseball intelligence.”
Breslow is smart. There seems to be no one who disputes this.
“I understand that some of you will see me as another Ivy League nerd with a baseball front office job,” Breslow said. “It’s true. I am that.”
The fact he went to the same school as Bloom and is roughly the same age as his predecessor is mostly coincidental, but the Red Sox do like the idea of hiring the smartest guy in the room.
“Craig is a problem solver of the highest order,” Kennedy said. “He literally turned himself into a big leaguer and turned himself into a front office executive using innovative and non-traditional methods.”
This is the element of Bloom that the Red Sox most clearly wanted to retain. The Red Sox liked his reasoning and his logic. They liked that he wasn’t always going on gut instinct. His detractors in the organization have said he was too indecisive and not inclusive of differing points of view, especially on the scouting side. Breslow is another “smartest guy in the room,” but he might lead differently.
“I think great decision makers are great synthesizers of information,” Breslow said. “That can look differently for different people, and particularly at different times, but I think what I would like to represent is an ability to weigh different information streams and to engage in conversations with the empathy of all parties.”
3. “His incredible experience as a Major League Baseball player.”
This is the most obvious difference between Bloom and Breslow. They share an academic resume, and much of what they value in player evaluation comes from a similar set of numbers and analysis. They might read it differently, but they’re studying a lot of the same stuff.
Bloom, though, studied Latin Classics in college, wrote briefly for Baseball Prospectus, and eventually rose through the ranks in the Tampa Bay Rays’ front office. Breslow, on the other hand, pitched at Yale, got drafted by the Brewers, and forged a 12-year career in the big leagues.
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Fair or not, there was often a sense that Bloom lacked some feel or care for clubhouse culture and the lived experience of major-league players. There can be no doubt Breslow understands that life.
“The playing, the struggles, the family side of it,” manager Alex Cora said. “That’s something that you cannot replicate. You have to live with (it). There’s a lot of sacrifices that we have made throughout our careers as baseball players. And that’s something, Craig, he understands.”
Breslow said he has not settled on a front office structure. He might hire or promote a second-in-command, or he might continue to lean on the various Red Sox executives who have been with the organization for a decade or more. How he handles this job is the great unknown. He’s never done it. The Red Sox privately acknowledge the uncertainty inherent in such a hire, but they also see unique upside if Breslow can successfully blend his many talents into a successful, sustainable, realized vision for the future.
“I think if you enter this position trying to hedge, trying to understand what it would look like to fail, you’re taking the wrong approach,” Breslow said. “I have confidence in my ability to execute this job, I have confidence in the people in this organization who have successfully executed in various roles in the past. … The commitment to winning from ownership is not a question here. We have established a very acute, very clear alignment of vision, very clear calibration on where this needs to go.”
Breslow’s job — just like the last guy’s job — is to get them there.
(Top photo of Breslow and Kennedy: AP Photo / Charles Krupa)