Was the Boston Red Sox' stunning Rafael Devers trade the result of dysfunction within Craig Breslow's front office?
Breslow, Boston's chief baseball officer since Oct. 2023, traded Devers to the San Francisco Giants amid a strained relationship with the veteran slugger. Devers called out Breslow after being asked to play first base earlier this season, when he had already reluctantly moved from third base to designated hitter.
Apparently, Devers wasn't the only member of the organization miffed by Breslow's approach to baseball operations. On Monday, a revealing Yahoo Sports report from Joon Lee detailed how the Red Sox front office has "lost cohesion" under Breslow's leadership. One example cited in Lee's report was Breslow's firing of a longtime scouting supervisor for insulting him during a team Zoom meeting.
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Read the excerpt from Lee's piece below:
"Meanwhile, Breslow has grown increasingly insulated. Multiple sources within the organization describe a front office losing cohesion. Staffers who helped build four championship teams — veterans of the Theo Epstein, Ben Cherington, Dave Dombrowski and Bloom regimes — now feel shut out of the operation. The collaborative spirit that once defined Red Sox baseball operations has frayed.
"The discontent intensified in May 2024, when Breslow brought in sports consulting firm Sportsology to conduct an organizational audit. The stated purpose was to streamline baseball operations. In practice, it triggered a wave of firings and accelerated the marginalization of some of the longest-tenured voices in the building, "characterizing the cultural shift to align more with Wall Street efficiency.
"One of the clearest signals came during an internal team Zoom meeting earlier this season. Toward the end, Carl Moesche — the Red Sox’s scouting supervisor and a team employee since 2017 — thought the call had ended. It hadn’t. As the meeting wrapped, his voice cut through a quiet moment.
'"Thanks, Bres, you f***ing stiff,' Moesche said, according to two team sources."
Lee's report also states that Breslow and manager Alex Cora "have not seen eye-to-eye on the direction of the team," and that the coaching staff has "grown frustrated with the state of player development, specifically how much emphasis is placed on swing mechanics and hitting data, often at the expense of fundamentals."
You can read the full report here.
Breslow, a former MLB relief pitcher, played for the Red Sox in 2006 and 2012-15. He joined the Chicago Cubs front office in 2019 and was promoted to assistant general manager in 2020. After the 2023 season, he replaced Chaim Bloom as the Red Sox' front-office leader.
So far, Breslow hasn't done much to convince the Fenway Faithful that he's an improvement over Bloom. The Red Sox stayed mediocre at 81-81 last season and are an uninspiring 37-36 this year. Now, like his predecessor, Breslow's tenure will likely be remembered for trading a face of the franchise.
Without Devers, the Red Sox will begin a three-game series in Seattle on Monday night. They will start a three-game series in San Francisco against Devers and the Giants starting on Friday.