Boston Red Sox players, coaches and executives alike are greeted by four words as they walk into the home dugout at Fenway Park.
At the bottom of the clubhouse stairs in all caps and red letters reads: “WE PLAY FOR CHAMPIONSHIPS.” Below them is a painting of the Commissioner’s Trophy.
(Gethin Coolbaugh)
Four World Series titles in two decades have set the bar high on Jersey Street — and rightly so. The goal isn’t to win once, but to win again and again and again.
Winning championships (plural) requires more than talent and a couple of breaks going your way in any given season. It requires an organizational knowledge of exactly what it takes to be the last team standing.
Who better to restore that winning standard in Boston than someone who has already won in Boston, right?
Craig Breslow is the man of the hour. As first reported by Alex Speier of the (John Henry-owned) Boston Globe, Henry and Co. have chosen the former Red Sox reliever as the successor to Chaim Bloom’s failed tenure as the Chief Baseball Officer. A.k.a the GM, the head honcho, the decision maker, or — if things go south — the next scapegoat.
Breslow has the credentials of a modern-day baseball ops director in the sabermetrics era. The 43-year-old was once hailed as the “smartest man in baseball” by the Minneapolis Star Tribune. A Wall Street Journal reporter once suggested he might be “the smartest man in baseball, if not the entire world.”
Breslow even befuddled his former Sox skipper John Farrell with his expansive vocabulary.
"Breslow uses words in a normal conversation that I'm not used to," Farrell told MLB.com in 2013. “When he starts to speak, some guys might not be thinking along with him.”
Like his predecessor, Breslow brings the pedigree of a Yale grad to the front offices at Fenway. He’s learned under the tutelage of Theo Epstein with the Chicago Cubs and rose through the ranks in short order to become the team’s Assistant GM and Vice President of Pitching.
But here’s where Breslow and Bloom (and Bloom and Alex Cora, for that matter) differ: their “feel” of the game.
Bloom never played in the majors. Breslow did. The southpaw played for seven MLB teams during a respectable 12-year career — including five with the Red Sox. His 3.45 ERA and 77 holds in 570 2/3 innings across 576 games proves he knew how to hack it at the big-league level.
Breslow’s crowning achievement as a player came during his 2013 postseason run with Boston that culminated with his first and only World Series ring. It would be a stretch to call him a key member of that title team, but Breslow certainly made the most of his only career playoff appearances.
In 10 postseason games in 2013, Breslow allowed just three runs (two earned) in 7 1/3 innings — good for a 2.45 ERA — and logged four holds opposite one blown save. His performance in the World Series was shakier, though, as he allowed all of those runs in three appearances while recording only one out. Not a World Series MVP-caliber performance, to say the least.
The bigger point here is that Breslow didn’t shy away from the October spotlight and played a part in pitching Boston to another championship. Just like Cora, he has first-hand knowledge of what it takes to bring home the hardware in one of the toughest markets in baseball to play — and win — in.
“There's just nothing like winning in Boston,” Red Sox president Sam Kennedy said in his October postseason press conference. He’s absolutely right. Kennedy added, “And we need to get that back. We want to get back.”
The task won’t be easy — but it won’t necessarily be overly difficult, either.
It isn’t as if Breslow is being tasked with constructing a winning organization from scratch. Despite their highly-publicized futility of the last two-plus seasons, the team still has a handful of good players and solid prospects (or trade chips) to build on.
To go from fringe playoff contender back to World Series contender, though, will require an element that is out of Breslow’s hands entirely: Henry’s willingness to spend with desperation to win.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to identify and acquire top free agents or available players such as Shohei Ohtani, Juan Soto, Clayton Kershaw, Blake Snell and the like. Although Breslow did major in molecular biophysics and biochemistry ... so he’s got that going for him.
Of course, there is more to building a successful baseball team than handing out big contracts. But if Breslow’s tenure is met with the same lukewarm financial commitment from ownership that Bloom received, he might as well start updating his resume now.
Breslow clearly wasn’t the first choice — or the second or third — of Red Sox ownership to lead the baseball ops department into the future (although I’m sure they’ll tell you so in the introductory press conference).
Will Breslow be able to fully implement his vision? Will that vision include breaking the bank to accelerate the rebuild? Will there be a power struggle with Cora, who reportedly has had a say in the hiring process of his boss? Those answers remain to be seen.
Yet his high level of involvement in a modern-day front office coupled with his first-hand experience of actual on-field performance and what it takes to be successful in this market provides hope that he can be a good fit.
At least, better than Bloom…
Gethin Coolbaugh is a contributor to Boston Sports Journal. Follow him @GethinCoolbaugh on X.
