It’s been a busy first year so far for Boston Red Sox chief baseball officer Craig Breslow and the next several weeks will be crucial for the club’s future. The Red Sox have the No. 12 pick in the 2024 MLB Draft in just under a month and the trade deadline is roughly six weeks away.
While in Toronto, The Athletic sat down with Breslow to discuss his strategy on the MLB Draft, how he plans to approach the trade deadline, the role of Driveline founder Kyle Boddy as an advisor, where things stand with the front office audit he’s conducting with the help of the Sportsology consulting firm and more.
(These questions and answers were lightly edited for clarity.)
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With the MLB Draft coming, what has your involvement in the process looked like and how has that fit in with your visions of building out the farm system?
For probably the past month or so we’ve had weekly check-ins with amateur scouting leadership just so I could get a feel for strategy, tools, etc. Certainly I’ve assessed our farm system, which is deep and strong, and a lot of that is because of really successful drafts over the last four or five years. And so, I’m mindful of being overly prescriptive here, given that it seems to be working out pretty well and trust all of them and want to make sure that they don’t feel like I’m micromanaging to change the strategy. I think a lot has been made of the fact that our system skews toward position players, but also the draft is an opportunity to just amass talent — and hopefully elite talent — so it’s tough to draft for positional need. That can become a factor, but especially early, you want to take the best player available.
As you assess the farm system and your depth in the middle infield, with the trade deadline approaching, is that an area you see being able to trade from to improve the club?
You always want to think about, in baseball terms, where do you have the highest internal replacement levels. But also, often the reason that you acquire a ton of middle infield depth is because that’s a really desirable position and those players tend to carry quite a bit of value. As guys start to bottleneck in the upper levels of the minor leagues, you do need to start understanding, it’s not just who carries the most value, but who carries the most value to the Boston Red Sox. So, I think we’re always willing to operate and have conversations around areas of depth but we’re mindful of not miscalculating the value of players simply because we may have amassed depth in a particular area.
Please enjoy the sweet HR swing of Roman Anthony. pic.twitter.com/ua7IDbw0Sc
— Red Sox Player Development (@RedSoxPlayerDev) June 17, 2024
When you started the job, you said it would take you months to feel like you had your brain wrapped around the entire organization. Where do you feel you’re at more than six months in?
The beauty of this and also the challenge of this is by the time you think you’ve got your arms around the organization, someone has made a material improvement in their true talent, they’ve developed and guys that were kind of off the radar now require really digging in and focusing on. But I feel good about appreciating the number of systems that we have in place, the overarching philosophies that govern our position on developing pitchers and hitters and defenders and base runners. I’ve started to build relationships with coaches and players, for that matter, but there’s an evolution there. One thing that I’ve really focused on since I got here is just this idea of development, being pervasive from the major leagues all the way down. And creating continuity between what we’re doing in the minor leagues and what we’re doing in the big leagues and vice versa. And if we have best practices in the minor leagues, we should employ them in the big leagues and the other way around. So I think that’s something I’m proud of. I think that’s manifesting in the steps forward that guys like (Jarren) Duran and (Wilyer) Abreu and the pitching group and (David) Hamilton and Ceddanne (Rafaela) have shown. But there is always work to be done.
How often have you visited some of the affiliates?
I haven’t yet. It’s something that I will do, and the convenience of the upper levels is valuable. Thus far, it’s kind of been trying to assess the big-league team when we’re in town and then when they go on the road, shifting internally and thinking about infrastructure build-out and the work that we’re doing with Sportsology and that kind of stuff. And then once I feel like we’ve established some sort of steady state there, then I think it’s important that I go out and see our players, see our coaches, make sure they understand how invested we are in them.
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I did want to ask you about the Sportsology consulting firm and how that auditing process of baseball operations is going. Where do things stand with that?
I think it’s going well. I’ve kind of made sure that I was providing regular updates for our people so that we could limit the extent to which they feel uncertainty or are anxious about where things are going. But at the same time, the reality is we finished last place and we’re not where we want to be. And that requires deep reflection and introspection and the ability to make hard decisions if they make us better. The one thing I’m committed to is doing what’s best for the organization. And that requires taking a hard look at the processes that we have in place, the systems we have in place, and the people that we have in place. On the other side of that, though, this is an opportunity for great people to get visibility and exposure to leadership, at a timeline that maybe they otherwise wouldn’t have. So from my perspective, things are going really well. Sportsology is not the decision-making group. But they are helping to foster really important conversations and helping us work through the framework that will enable us to evaluate and assess our front office.
How does it work?
We’re talking daily. So they’re very engaged and working very closely with our leadership group. And so there’s complete transparency around the work that’s been done and conversations that are being had.
Is there a deadline or timeline that you’d like to have this audit completed by?
The right answer is as quickly as we can be done knowing that we do not sacrifice accuracy, attention or comprehensiveness in favor of haste. So we’re not there yet, but I think we can start to see the information coming together, how this will tie up and then ultimately what we do with the information that we acquire.
How are the evaluations conducted?
They are not evaluating people, we are evaluating people. They’re helping us create the frameworks that allow us to do that and certain benchmarks against which we want to evaluate and how to calibrate the information that’s coming in. But the evaluations are being done by us.
Back to the big-league club. Heading into the trade deadline, how do you balance where the club is at by adding for this season versus continuing to build for the future?
It’s difficult and one thing that I’ve pointed to is it’s extraordinarily difficult to try to accomplish both. So there are meaningful games to play between now and the deadline. Every time we set foot on the field, we’ll learn something new. I think what we have to be careful of is trying to straddle the line. But I think the most important thing to come out of our play last week is that there’s a really exciting group of players that are taking the field every night. So I think we can all see the reasons for optimism. Exactly how that materializes over the next five weeks or so, six weeks, remains to be seen. But I think, irrespective of that, it’s an exciting time to be in this organization. I think it’s an exciting time to be a fan of the organization. And we’re going to learn more and be realistic and also be decisive.
Electric night at Fenway. pic.twitter.com/qbttMLWfca
— Red Sox (@RedSox) June 17, 2024
Since this will be your first trade deadline running a team, are you more inclined to try to make trades earlier or wait to see how things play out across the league?
I don’t know that it makes sense to say anything is off the table or anything is off-limits. If we have an opportunity potentially to improve the organization in the short term, in the long term, like we always have to be able to have those conversations. I’ve been on the other side of this. Like I’ve been in the clubhouse and the job of the 26 guys on the team and the coaching staff is to make it as hard as possible to do anything other than add to this team. I respect the heck out of that. And my decision is to try to balance all of the competing interests and do what I believe is best for the organization.
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Lastly, I wanted to ask you what role Driveline founder Kyle Boddy has had in acting as a special advisor for you?
He’s someone that I’ve been able to bounce ideas off of. And then also, he’s engaged in more specific projects. He works closely with our performance group and given that Driveline has had a ton of success integrating sports science, strength and conditioning with skill acquisition training. So he’s put his thumb on the scale appropriately there. Obviously with the pitching group and pitching development but then also Driveline has emerged, not just as a leader in data-driven development, but also being very resourceful and cutting-edge in terms of technology. And so he’s helped us work through ways in which they’ve leveraged AI with their facility and how we can operate more efficiently. So he’s a really talented, bright guy who helps us across every stage.
And he’s working remotely for you at this time, correct?
He’s based in Seattle. He was in Boston a couple days ago. He was in Florida twice this spring then made his first trip to Boston last week.
(Photo of Breslow in spring training: Kim Klement Neitzel / USA Today)