MLB notes: Red Sox boss Craig Breslow lays out ‘future is now’ vision for pivotal offseason

After five years of selling fans a vision for the future, the Red Sox say the future is finally here.

That’s the message top Red Sox decision-makers have pushed since the club fell short of reaching the playoffs for the third straight year. At the team’s season-ending press conference and in multiple interviews since, the Red Sox have expressed a need for greater urgency while acknowledging that Red Sox fans have waited long enough.

Speaking to the Herald one-on-one, Red Sox chief baseball officer Craig Breslow expressed similar sentiments while laying out his vision for what the upcoming offseason could hold. In summary, everything is on the table as the club looks to take the next step and get back into playoff contention.

The following interview was lightly edited for clarity.

Q: Last year the club caught a lot of heat for not doing much in fr ee agency, but outside of the Dodgers and Royals it was a pretty quiet market across the league. Why do you think that was? And how do you see the free agent market unfolding this winter?

A: It’s hard to forecast how other teams will behave. I think we’ve got to be focused on what we need to do to put a better team on the field and I think we’ve been pretty outspoken about that both in terms of identifying exactly what our needs are, whether that’s rebuilding the bullpen, adding starting pitching, balancing out the lineup with some more right-handed bats, or the paths to approach that. I think what’s most important is our commitment to putting a team on the field that’s capable of winning the division, and we have some work to do.

Q: You have spoken frequently about the need to balance the lineup and to add more right-handed power. What qualities would you like any potential targets to possess?

A: Some positional versatility would be great, just because we have a number of left-handed bats that we would want to be in the lineup every day. Finding at-bats and figuring out the best way to create the matchups that we want is certainly one thing. Our field is so primed for being exploited by right-handers with power, particularly guys who can hit the ball to the air on the pull side, so that’s a profile we’d be looking at. When you think about the success that Tyler O’Neill had this last season, it was predominantly because of his ability to hit the ball really hard and in the air to the pull side.

Q: Do you view a Derek Jeter/Alex Rodriguez situation where either a new addition shifts to a different position, or where one of your current guys moves to accommodate the newcomer, as a viable option?

A: I think it’s a possibility. Obviously it’s not as simple to answer in the hypothetical, we would need to think about who those players are and who we would be moving around to fill, but we’re working backwards from how do we put the best team on the field. Whatever that means, however difficult those conversations have to be, we have to be willing to have them, but we’re not going to move people around simply for the sake of doing that, there needs to be a consequential improvement to the team to justify it.

Q: It seems like at least one valuable player will have to be traded so the pieces can all fit together. If that comes to pass, how will you determine who stays and who goes?

A: It’s a combination of a bunch of different factors. It’s one thing to look objectively at performance or projections. There is a ton of uncertainty in those. We also have to evaluate some of the subjective considerations here, not just how good is or what is a player’s performance today, but also what do we think it can be. We know our team’s players better than other team’s players, hopefully that would put us in a better position to make great decisions around them. It doesn’t always work out that way, but we’re trying to balance so many different competing interests, the most important of which is improving the product on the field next season. We also have to think about the timelines of players to where we want to be improved and vie for playoff contention, not just next year but for a series of years. So we have to think about how we can maximize the value of our players, and we can only put eight on the field at any one time. So if there are really valuable players who aren’t going to realize that value in Red Sox uniforms, I think we have to be creative and decisive in terms of finding ways to turn that into value that impacts our team.

Q: From the outside looking in second base seems like it will probably be filled internally. Is that a fair assessment? How do you see the club’s second base situation?

A: We feel really good about the internal options that we have. I think we saw the version of Vaughn (Grissom) that we thought we were getting when he was fully healthy, and significantly bigger and stronger than he was earlier in the season when he was battling both injuries and sickness, and a credit to him for the work that he’s done. Obviously Hammy (David Hamilton) got hurt late in the season but he was a guy that was really dynamic and changed the game with his speed, has a ton of range. We also had a number of guys perform really well in Triple-A. Kristian Campbell can move all over the place and collected every piece of hardware there was for minor league performance and had just a phenomenal season. Chase Meidroth is another guy who had a really good season in Triple-A. So we feel really good about the options we’ll have there, both left-handed and right-handed, when we add guys like Marcelo Mayer into the mix and ultimately kind of where he ends up, if he ends up at shortstop and what that does and what the timeline looks like. So without putting a ton of pressure on guys that haven’t taken a major league at-bat just yet, I do think we feel pretty about the depth that we’ve amassed in the middle of the field, but like I’ve been saying, if there is an opportunity to bring in a player that improves our team, we’re going to be open to that. I think we’ve asked a lot of our fans in terms of patience and sacrifice and trade-offs, and it’s time to deliver.

Q: The infield defense was a weakness again this season. Do you view that as a problem that requires an external solution? Or would a healthy Trevor Story basically do the trick?

A: I hate to sound like I’m repeating the same thing but we’re open to multiple paths to improving the team. That said, I think when Trevor was out there we saw that calmness and stability that he brought, both in his ability to play shortstop but also the stability to the rest of the infield. If Ceddanne Rafaela is playing center field, he’s an elite center fielder, and we obviously saw Jarren Duran take significant steps forward, both he and Wilyer Abreu as Gold Glove finalists, so Trevor playing shortstop in this counterintuitive way makes our outfield defense significantly improved while also providing this stabilizing, calming force on the infield.

Q: How does Masataka Yoshida fit into the puzzle?

A: I think we saw at his best a guy who can really hit, who can control an at-bat, a guy who is capable of getting on base in a number of different ways, doesn’t chase, doesn’t swing and miss, and there was a stretch where he was arguably the best hitter on the team. I think there’s a number of ways we can be creative in moving pieces around and positional versatility elsewhere helps that, but he’s certainly a guy we’re going to count on to be a big part of the offense. (Note: This interview was conducted before news broke that Yoshida had undergone offseason shoulder surgery, but after the procedure took place.)

Q: How important is it to add more left-handers to the pitching staff, either starters or relievers?

A: I think we saw in stretches Brennan Bernardino or Cam Booser or Bailey Horn or Zach Penrod showed glimpses of really helping us. There was some inconsistency to the performance, there were some injuries we needed to work through, but having that dominant shutdown left-handed reliever is a huge weapon for Alex (Cora) and something that we’ll explore. But at the end of the day what we need are pitchers who can get outs, both right-handed and left-handed, and if our best chance to get a really good left-handed hitter out is a right-handed pitcher than that’s the person we’re going to bring into that game. I think we need to continue to add talent to the organization, and in a perfect world, sure, some of that would be left-handed, but if we can continue to raise the talent floor I think we’re going to be better off.

Q: How would you assess the progress the organization has made in terms of developing young pitching talent since you arrived?

A: I think we’ve seen some glimpses of what we are capable of doing and some reason for optimism. We’re certainly not where we need to be both in terms of overall talent and depth, but that should not diminish the meaningful steps forward that a number of guys have taken. We saw Luis Guerrero come up and be a real weapon for Alex down the stretch as a reliever. We saw Richard Fitts and Quinn Priester both come up, and Priester is a sample of one but Fitts over a number of starts pitched very well, in addition to the three guys that were homegrown starters that had reached innings totals that they never had and start totals that they never had before. I think when you look at what’s happening in the minor leagues, we had pretty significant jumps in overall stuff, in velocity, in strikeout rates. So I think we have the framework in place, and we drafted 14 pitchers this year and wanted to give our pitching development infrastructure led by Justin Willard the raw ingredients to get to work.

Q: You often speak of improving the starting rotation’s depth. How do you define depth? Are we talking guys who could come in and take the mound if one of the main guys gets hurt? Or does that also encompass the front of the rotation, including an ace?

A: I think it can encompass both. I think we should be looking at premium talent that enables you to feel really good about Game 1 of a playoff series, and also we want to minimize whatever drop-off exists when someone does get hurt. I think the way you do that is having meaningful depth that you feel like can come up and step in and is essentially plug-and-play in Triple-A. I think we saw some of that late in the season when we talk about what Richard and Quinn were able to do when they came up, and Cooper Criswell another guy who stepped into the rotation and took meaningful innings for us, but I think we were hurt by at times not having that depth ready to contribute. So when (Brayan) Bello went on the IL, we had to skip Nick Pivetta or Tanner Houck’s starts and needed to piece together bullpen games, I think that’s where the lack of depth showed up.

Q: As far as the bullpen goes, you had a lot of guys who bounced back and forth between the majors and Triple-A. Some of them had success in the majors but the consistency wasn’t always there. Knowing you have so many guys internally, do you think that’s something you can count on next year or do you think the bullpen really needs some outside help?

A: I think bullpen turnover is typically pretty significant and bullpen variance is also typically pretty significant. Year to year it’s hard to know who will emerge as the dominant backend force. We obviously had two guys at the back of our bullpen who are set to be free agents who were pitching in every meaningful, close game that we played and we have to figure out how to replace that. I think we can feel pretty good about what we saw out of Justin Slaten, what a healthy Liam Hendriks will look like. Weissert when he came back from the minors was dominant, and guys like Luis Guerrero, Bernardino and Zack Kelly at times. But the inconsistency is something that plagued us and the way we can combat inconsistency is to increase the depth so we don’t need to stick with guys when a reset or identifying a development target would be most beneficial, and also raising the talent. The relievers that tend to perform consistently year over year are a bit scarce, but those are the guys you build bullpens around.

Q: Where do things stand as far as hiring a GM, or as far as the coaching staff is concerned?

A: Like most teams that are trying to pursue every opportunity to improve, we’re taking a good hard look at everything that we’re doing from the office to the field staff and decided it was time to make some changes. That’s not an indictment of the work any of them did, all incredible workers who cared deeply about the organization, but we feel like we would benefit from some new ideas and fresh perspectives. We are currently sourcing the best candidates for those roles and that’s a process that will be very intentional and thoughtful to end up with the best coaches we can possibly find.

As it relates to the general manager search, at some point soon I’ll need to shift my focus to thinking about that, but have spent the bulk of my time over the last 10 months or so trying to wrap my arms around the organization, position the different departments in the way that makes sense to me that’s primed for efficiency and being as effective as we possibly can. Now I’ll need to balance obviously finding a general manager, a thought partner, someone that will challenge me and question me and we can get the best out of each other while also prioritizing the work that needs to be done on the field for the 2025 Red Sox.

Q: A lot of Red Sox fans have become highly jaded and cynical after the way things have played out the last five years. Do you have any message to those fans about what they can expect this winter?

A: I think what they can expect from our front office is a group of people who are committed to making difficult, decisive decisions to put the best team on the field that we can in 2025, one that is able to compete for a division championship and one that is capable of making a deep postseason run. We have asked a lot of Red Sox fans over the last few years and we’ve pointed to the buildout of the farm system and we talk about prospects, but I think it’s really important to acknowledge that we shouldn’t have to ask our fans to look to the minor leagues to find reason for optimism or excitement, they should be able to look on the field at Fenway Park. Ultimately we’re going to be evaluated by the number of games that we win, that’s the way it should be, that’s why I took this job, because I know what it felt like, I know what it feels like to win the World Series in Boston. I was fortunate enough to be part of a team that did that and I am looking forward to having that feeling from this position and being able to share that with all of our fans.