The Red Sox have been searching for their next head of baseball operations since firing chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom last month. It appears that search is beginning to pick up steam, as The Athletic’s Patrick Mooney reported earlier today sources have indicated the Red Sox are in “advanced discussions” with Craig Breslow, who currently serves as assistant GM and senior vice president of pitching for the Cubs, after he interviewed with the club for their top baseball operations job.
That being said, Sean McAdam of MassLive.com pumps the breaks on those rumors, relaying that sources have indicated Mooney’s characterization of the talks “may be premature.” Alex Speier of the Boston Globe, meanwhile, stakes out something of a middle ground between those two reports, noting that a source described Breslow as “a leading candidate” for the top job with the Red Sox, while simultaneously noting that the process isn’t yet approaching the finish line. Speier goes on to note that the Sox have been conducting first-round interviews this week, and that the search appears to be approaching its second round.
Both Mooney and McAdam suggest that, while Breslow’s initial interview was for the job at the head of the Red Sox baseball operations department, Boston may look to hire a more experienced president of baseball operations to lead the department while installing Breslow as the new president’s number two in a GM role. While McAdam suggests that such an arrangement could allow Breslow to “grow into the No. 1 role after a few years,” Mooney adds that if the Red Sox look to add two executives without making Breslow the top decision maker, the Cubs would be in position to make a “substantial offer” for Breslow to stay in his current role with Chicago. Breslow sits below president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer and GM Carter Hawkins in the Cubs’ front office chain of command, alongside fellow assistant GM Ehsan Bokhari.
The Cubs have seen significant developments in their player development apparatus on the pitching side during Breslow’s tenure with the club, which began in 2019. The 2023 season in particular saw many of Chicago’s younger arms take impressive steps forward, with left-hander Justin Steele emerging as a candidate for the NL Cy Young award, Adbert Alzolay establishing himself as a quality closer and younger arms like righty Javier Assad and Jordan Wicks flashing mid-to-back of the rotation potential with solid seasons of their own.
Breslow, of course, is far from the only candidate in the mix for the top job in Boston. Though high-profile candidates like former Astros GM James Click and former Rangers president of baseball operations Jon Daniels have declined the opportunity to interview for the position, other experienced candidates like former Pirates GM Neal Huntington and current Twins GM Thad Levine have reportedly interviewed for the position. The Red Sox are also considering a number of internal candidates, including assistant GMs Eddie Romero and Mike Groopman, as well as VP of amateur scouting & player development Paul Toboni.
Welcome to the interview: We’ve taken the liberty to select your assistants, your manager and all your players. We just need someone to blame if things go wrong. Do you think you’d be interested in the job?
Lol. Perfect.
“And here’s the nurse to take your pulse before we finalize the contract.”
Makes you wonder if bloom really had any say during his tenure.
Trading Betts – No say
Getting under the CBT – No say
Many large contracts – No say
Vazquez for Valdez and Abreu – yes
Renfro for JBJ & 2 MiLB – yes unfortunately
Garrett Richards – yes unfortunately
…..
I don’t understand how the Cubs would be in a position to make him an offer. They already have a GM, so even though they can give him more money, they can’t match the title. That applies regardless of POBO or GM. Teams seldom stand in the way of a promotion, and it would be a bad look for the Cubs. Nicky D, you care to explain yourself?
Breslow would have to be nuts to take the Red Sox deal.
Rent, don’t buy in Boston.
Talk to Chaim before you make a big mistake.
This is probably the best opportunity in the majors, and probably by far.
1-You are already starting off 81 Py wins.
2-You probably have 20 slots already accounted for, so there isn’t a huge amount of work to be done, albeit serious work.
3-You have at least $34M to spend under the cap, and my guess is Henry has learned he cannot be #12 in spending again.
4-You have a very good farm.
Let’s say Henry okays an increase to what the Phillies are spending. That gives you $60.6M to spend. you can buy Yamamoto & Nola with that money, with enough left over for a 2B. And you would still have Mayer, Anthony, Teel, Rafael, Yorke, etc in the pipeline.
Assuming Henry comes to his sense, it will be difficult to not win with this team.
Pass on Nola
I wouldn’t, but if you wanted to substitute Monty for Nola, you will still have a very good team. A golden opportunity for a new GM.
I actually remember when this guy was last a good/elite major leaguer! That’s a rarity for front office guys. I was initially surprised when I saw his name linked to the Red Sox since I thought it was as a player and he last played in MLB a really really long time ago.
I remember when he was in the minors. Christ I feel old.
At least he’s smarter than bloom and he’s definitely smarter than cora, so there’s that.
I’ve got a fence post that probably also fits that description.
GA – You beat me to the punchline!!! Nice job.
Hahahahaaaa! Good one!
How do we even know that?!
The management org chart looks like something out of the Matrix.
I’ll trust the guy who majored in molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale to run a complicated organization over the one who studied a dead language every day of the week.
It is a lot different managing people, competing visions, unrealistic expectations of ownership, fans, the media etc.
Like having a sail boat off the New England Coast with
multiple sails all pointing in different directions
and the boat keeps going around in circles not getting anywhere.
Emotional Intelligence is very important to success in this area.
You can stack up degrees and abstract knowledge in esoteric areas
all you want, but if you cannot manage all the people, all the egos, all the competing goals, values, the process, then you will not succeed at that job.
I accidentally muted someone. Is there any way to unmute a poster? All I see is this:
“1 comment is hidden because you muted the comment author”
It was probably the Seager/Bauer clown. You’ll wanna keep him muted.
Simple Dorothy;
On the upper right hand side the circle thjat appear to have a white and gray head and part of a chest. Click it. That will take you to your Mute List.
Self-evident from there.
Dotty – Go to “My Account” then “Update My Profile”. Select who you want to remove from the muted list, then click the X next to their name.
I accidentally muted someone who was one of my favorite posters I interacted with regularly. The only way I knew this is the guy I accidentally blocked. reached out to another member to contact me wanting to know why I muted him! It was a bit embarrassing but he understood how it happened. I only have added a handful of people to my mute list over all the years since I’ve been here, and all of them are (or were) obnoxious trolls. I don’t mean Yankees-vs.-Red Sox trash-talking stuff. I’m fine with that. I draw the line at truly disruptive posters looking to cause chaos, or those still dealing with childhood issues and take it out on others. Fortunately, there are very few here.
You can only unmute someone from the web-based version. Can’t do it on the app, at least as far as I can tell. In the web version, go to tool bar at the top, and at the far right there ‘s a silhouette of a head. Click on that and it takes you to your profile. Scroll down, and at the bottom of the page are any names you’ve muted. Click on them to unmute.
Of course, if I’m that one person you’ve muted, then all hope is lost!
Get him on board!
It looks like Chaim is still running the show to me. Nothing happening, the Sox still can’t make a decision, time is not of the essence, let’s call the dreaded anal department & see what they have to say? What’s the percentage of this & that? Omg!!!! Get a person w/ balls that can make a decision & choose a direction you stinking morons! It’s not as complicated as you make it. It’s simply baseball. Let’s play ball. It’s starts with getting back to having stars. Pitching, hitting & defense My goodness man. Hire Breslow! This is the right guy. If not? In 3 years you can start over again. You are getting excellent at this hiring & firing nonsense.Sheesh! Go Red Sox!
I vote anyone who willing since good mlb starters not crapp from the dumpster
Why do writers say “pump the breaks”? I assume it’s a joke I’m missing because surely they don’t think that’s correct.
That journalist pumped the breaks on Breslow getting the job? Oh well, them’s the brakes
Why not Ng for POBO and Breslow for GM? It just feels, from what I read, that they might complement each other well.
JoeBrady – Ng couldn’t handle Miami so why could she handle Boston which is so much more toxic?
Breslow is smarter than Ng, he’s got baseball experience, he worked with Theo who probably spent hours telling him tales about the ownership so he’s prepared.
Breslow is the best candidate suggested so far.
What does he lack?
Experience and that’s tough to overlook.
His knowledge of the game and modern metrics and player evaluation techniques is as good as anyone. Plus he”s a lot smarter than Bloom.
Can he pull the trigger on big trades? We don’t know
Can he fire Cora? We don’t know
Can he completely replace the infrastructure from POBO down? Yes and he will be making choices based on baseball experience and modern metrics.
So he’s a candidate with no experience but great credentials plus he’s a somewhat local boy who has been with the Red Sox organization in the past.
If not for the lack of experience, I’d be all in. He might make an outstanding POBO who can find an outstanding GM that has experience.
Best candidate so far.
TF –
I think Breslow’s biggest challenge would be less on the experience front, and more on the culture front.
At the CHC, ownership’s MO was to give a budget/resources to a particular department, then give the employee more or less free reign to run with it and make it their own. Breslow thrived within that system.
In BOS, ownership wants their fingers in the pie, and, if you look at what the new hire(s) will walk into, a VPBO (o’halloran) is already in place. That’s nominally your #2 if you take the title at face value relegating the GM to #3. Then you got the 3 AGMs holding over, a manager you can’t replace, a coaching staff there, all while these people are pushing ownership/Henry’s agenda with Kennedy prodding you the whole time. That’s a very different system, walking in without much freedom to run with things.
GA – It’s all in the negotiation. DD told them he was NOT going to reduce his salary needs based on their past mistakes and he was allowed to push the total over the cap as long as his contribution to the total was under the cap.
Bloom didn’t have the experience or backbone to do the same.
Breslow may have been advised by Theo that he needs to define parameters to the job as you have described. I don’t believe the owners would allow him to fire O’Halloran or the three amigos who ran the team after DD but if it’s clear upfront that they have “different” jobs than their titles suggest and those are approved by Breslow, then they can probably keep the lame duck execs from getting in the way as long as they know their roles.
It’s going to be a big problem getting anyone good because you are right, the organization is in total chaos from the top down. Owners who build direct relationships with managers is never a good thing if it undermines all those in between. Cora needs to go for so many different reasons related to his skill set, his morals and the toxic way he embeds himself where he doesn’t belong.
I’m really worried that all the points you make will leave us with another incompetent person running the show. After the 86 year wait then the success it’s really difficult to have had the rug pulled out from underneath us when they fired DD and dumped Mookie.
It wasn’t right. It wasn’t in the best interest of the fan base. It was not a smart business move for making profits. It was simply one of the biggest brain cramps an owner has ever had in any sport and we are paying for it 4 years later and probably another 6 if we don’t get the right guy this time.
They may hire a competent person who is internally handcuffed from making any bold and necessary decisions.
I still think they may be stuck just promoting an internal candidate
who is already surviving the toxic, internal Red Sox Front Office wars.
Interesting comment. When DD started at Philly, I told my Philly friend that DD’s biggest strength was convincing Middleton to spend the extra money. I didn’t care for the Schwarber or Castellanos signings, but as I said at the time, if you are at $210M with a .525 record, you should either go down to $185M and play .500, or go up to $250M and play .550.
Except that Dave Dombrowski is not just about spending money.\
Dombrowski has qualitatively improved/upgraded the entire Phillies organization
from top to bottom: player development, drafting, internal management processes and communication.
And, Dombrowski has restocked the farm/protecting his top pitching prospects and others.
Also, Dombrowski has made deals for younger, cost controlled foundational pieces like Brandon Marsh, Pache and others.
Saying it is “all about the money and spending” discounts all the other numerous factors that come into play into building a consistent winning team.
Money and the ability to spend certainly helps, but with just money thrown around haphazardly the results can fall short like the Mets, Padres, Yankees etc.
SportsFanpppp – You may be right but that would not effect the lack of winning that has been the experience in 2020 to 2023. Boston needs a STRONG POBO who doesn’t have to take orders from ownership. DD was the perfect guy to keep the fan base happy but he couldn’t keep the ownership happy with Cora sticking a knife in his back every step of the way. Cora is a spineless back-stabber who wants everything his way and so far has accomplished that. He got his job back after committing the most heinous crime in the history of the sport. He survived the firing of two GMs who were both better at their jobs than he is. Yep, Bloom vs Cora I’ll take Bloom because he’s better at his job than Cora but he’s still light years behind DD so he needed to go.
That will only happen if John Henry & Ownership take steps back from the team, and if Sam Kennedy is sent back to business OPs and banned from the baseball Ops department,
And, if all the VPs of their desks and surrounding space are given an org chart that shows they cannot go crying to Henry or Werner or Kennedy every time their feelings get hurt or things are not decided their way and must report to the GM who is below the Pres of Baseball Ops.
The Pres of Baseball Ops #1 concern and job is to run all baseball ops, make all final baseball ops decisions, and build a championship ballclub and not get bogged down in infighting/backstabbing and turf wars etc.
What does he lack?
Experience and that’s tough to overlook.
Can he pull the trigger on big trades? We don’t know
Can he fire Cora? We don’t know
===========================
These are some of the reasons I suggested Ng to work alongside of Breslow.
I am not commenting on whether Ng is any good, but her experience could be useful for a newcomer,
And her deadline trades, which I think are kind of ordinary overall, were still trades and helped get Miami into the playoffs. I don’t think Bloom was decisive enough, though that could’ve come from the jumble enough.
IRT Cora, I am okay with his managing, but his weighing in on the GM/POBO decision is a huge conflict of interest. Asking his opinion of some of Ng’s trades is fine, but that’s all. Even the publicity of his role is a huge issue. Most GMs probably have to put up with some interference from above. But even in the real world, a lot of managers will walk away if one their subordinates is a sacred cow.
And to be honest, even for me, the results of 2018 & 2021 have now been offset with the results of 2022/23. He needs to make good this year.
Joe – I gave you a thumb, but how can you not include 2019 as a massive managerial failure? The do-nothing approach to ST and the winning-doesn’t-matter-prior-to-June approach did that team in … a team that had won 108 games and a World Championship the prior year.
1-The recency factor. It wasn’t an attempt to analyze every year.
2-I’d say it was a poor year, but for about half our 2018 squad, it was a last hurrah. The top-10 bWAR players for 2018 had a cum bWAR of 46.9. In 2019, they accumulated 30.4. The core of it was that the entire rotation stunk, except ERod (and Eovaldi missed almost the entire year.). It should’ve been better, but I am not shocked in retrospect.
Joe – Toxicity in Boston too much for Ng. Her experience is noted but it’s like taking a player who decided he didn’t want to play for team and pulls off his jersey and leaves the field. Do you really want him on your team especially if you know your team is a disaster compared to the team he quit on.
Fever – Great points as usual!!! Why did 2019 happen?
1 – The no knowledge many opinions Cora thought that pitching in November was too close to the end of February so he gave the pitchers two extra weeks off and brought them to SP late. Any pitcher would tell you a 3 month rest is more than enough to recover from the previous season. 100 years of watching the Yankees is proof that there is no carryover effect on pitchers.
2 – Due to the scrambled timing several SPs came up lame early in the season from an inappropriate beginning to their year. Eovaldi who starred in the post season got hurt early. Sale and Price both did not do well with the longer than should have been lay-off and eventually got hurt too.
3 – After winning a world series with Mookie at leadoff and Benny at 2 he flip-flopped the two and it was a disaster. Couple his stupidity with a very daunting West coast start to the season and Boston was out of it by mid April. The talent was still there except for the pitching injuries. Is that any reason to fire the GM? NOPE. That event was not based on performance.
4 – OPS+ in 2016 Papi’s last year – 112. 2017 it fell to 92. DD signs JD and the OPS+ rises back to 112!! 2019 was 106 but the wins dropped from 108 to 84 wins. Why? The impact of Cora on the pitching staff!!!! It’s that simple. DD did nothing wrong. The hitters had an excellent year but Devers killed the defense and Cora killed the pitching.
That’s why Farrell and DD is a far better combination than Cora and DD because Cora had such a good team in 2018 thanks to DD that they won DESPITE Cora being the manager. Marble mouth handled the press and coddled an extremely immature Devers and that’s it!! He cost them at least 12 wins that year and like Fever has pointed out many times he didn’t play to win all the games in each series because he wanted to give those he identified with a chance to play. He played the crap bench players he related to far more than they should have played. There are 12 series that could have been sweeps if he had been reasonable about who he played. He also screwed Sale by sitting multiple all-stars during games he pitched. Sale could have won at least 6 more games had he pitched with his normal team behind him.
I’m starting to like this move more and more each day. Hopefully the Sox can get it done sooner rather than later so the offseason isn’t effected to immensely.
Who wants a job where you’ll have no say in the operations, have a poor manager and roster dumped on you and know that in a couple of years, said manager will be replacing you? I doubt Eddie Romero would even want this.
Just to annoy myself today, I figured out the single best POBO and manager candidates.
Theo
Tito
They had one bad month in 8 years and Henry got rid of them.
Love Tito, but he totally lost control of the team in 2011. Being chummy with Pedroia, letting that chicken-and-beer fiasco develop and blowing the playoff chase. He let his personal issues get in the way. Glad he wasn’t a surgeon.
It might be true, and maybe it was time to go, but they were destroying teams thru the end of August. After that, the arms were finished. Our rotation had an ERA of 7.08 in September.
I don’t blame Theo for much during his epic run, but he had too much faith in Beckett & Lester. Lackey was hurt, Wakefield is the dependable #4/5. Once Beckett hurt his ankle in TO, even if we snuck into the playoffs, we were finished anyway.
Joe – agree about 2011 ! If the Red Sox had more pitching in September 2011, they do not go 7-20 and miss the playoffs by 1 game. Chicken and beer is not an issue, and Theo and Terry do not get fired.
Joe – Love your choice and I would add Farrell/DD. They won two unprecedented division titles and might have won a ring if not for the cheating Astros.
Just read Kapler interviewed..didnt see that coming
Smart guy. He’d probably be a good addition somewhere in the FO.
Maybe if John Henry and FSG cared more about winning baseball games instead of worrying about how diverse they can make the front office, then more people would interview for a job that up until recently was considered one of the best jobs in all of baseball?
Who wants a job where they can hire, fire, waive, trade, promote or demote anyone without rubber stamp approvals from 43 VP’s, 4 vice GM’s and Sam Kennedy?
Pretty positive that “meanwhile” has to start the sentence and it can’t come in the middle.
Also, there should be no comma after “that” in this sentence:
“Both Mooney and McAdam suggest that, while Breslow’s initial interview was for the job at the head of the Red Sox baseball operations department, “
Sox ownership needs to be honest & admit that they are simply looking for a placeholder until Alex Cora “wants” the job. If they were serious about change, they would not make the new POBO have to stick with Cora in 2024, he should have been fired with Bloom. But now it seems, they want him to have even more power. Breslow or whoever takes this job (whatever title the Sox give them), will only be a puppet with several puppeteers controlling the moves. Who would want this job. The Sox NEED someone like Daniels, Hazen or Ng….but instead we are stuck with Cora.