The Boston Red Sox’ shocking decision to trade away another star player in Rafael Devers has led to plenty of questions and reports about the organization and its vision.
One of the most damning stories to surface on Monday came from Joon Lee of Yahoo! Sports, who details a front office that is “losing cohesion” under the leadership of chief baseball officer Craig Breslow.
Lee cites multiple sources in describing Breslow as becoming “increasingly insulated” and shutting out “staffers who helped build four championship teams” while turning to sports consulting firm Sportsology to “streamline baseball operations” in a Wall Street-like move.
According to Lee, one example of this shift came earlier this season when Breslow fired scouting supervisor Carl Moesche, a team employee since 2017, after Moesche was caught on a hot Zoom mic saying, “Thanks, Bres, you f***ing stiff,” at the end of a meeting.
Breslow appeared on WEEI’s The Greg Hill Show Tuesday morning for the “Front Office Report” and was asked about Lee’s report. He declined to comment on the Moesche incident, specifically, but did address the article as a whole. Listen to the full interview above.
“If I or this front office has become increasingly insulated, that's absolutely not the direction that we are trying to head,” Breslow said. “What I will say is, over the last year and a half since I got here, I have spent quite a bit of time trying to understand our operation, our people, the way that we are set up. We have grown significantly in size over the last several years, and I think in some ways, it has maybe removed or detached some of our people from what was happening on the field. And anchoring all of the work that we do to what's happening on the field at Fenway Park, and the wins and losses of the team, is something that's critically important to me.
“I feel like my job is to strike the right balance of people who have been here for a really long time and have contributed meaningful value to the four World Series championship teams under this ownership group, and also recognize, balance that with the fact that we're where we are and I am here because the results on the field have not been good enough for the last several years. So, to continue to do exactly what we had done in the way that we had done it, I think would be a recipe for continued disappointment and frustration from our fans and from the organization.
“We needed to make sure that we were operating in a way that was going to get us back to the top of the AL East and to the top of baseball, and that required some difficult choices and some change, but never a deliberate decision to insulate or push people away, but rather a very intentional effort to preserve all of the things that make the Boston Red Sox great and improve the things that needed to be improved upon relative to the rest of the industry.”