On Monday night, Red Sox chief baseball officer Craig Breslow and team president Sam Kennedy met with the media via Zoom to discuss one of the most surprising trades in team history, as designated hitter Rafael Devers was moved to the Giants on Sunday for starting pitcher Kyle Harrison, relief pitcher Jordan Hicks and two minor league players.
And while much of the Zoom call was spent explaining their convoluted rationale behind trading the team’s best hitter and lone remaining member of the 2018 World Series team, it was one answer from Kennedy in particular that had the ears perked of WEEI’s Adam Jones and Rich Keefe.
When Kennedy was asked why his team seems to repeatedly be moving on from players who are tracking towards inductions into the National Baseball Hall of Fame (remember that Mookie Betts guy?), he went into defense mode.
“Each and every player-decision is its own individual decision,” said Kennedy. “And as I said at the outset, it's really, really hard when we either can't line up with our own players who become free agents, or we don't line up on extensions. Obviously very different circumstances, but I'll put our record up against anybody else's in Major League Baseball over the last 24 years.
“We're incredibly proud of what we've built here. We've got more trophies and banners to show for it than any other organization in Major League Baseball, and we are so proud of that. And this clubhouse believes in itself, and we believe in them. And I think our players are going to be pretty vocal over the next couple of months about the belief in themselves and what they've been put together to do.
“Craig Breslow - it's easy for me to talk about him. He knows what it means to be a World Series champion in Boston. His tenure here, albeit short, has been defined by bold, decisive, aggressive moves. Probably feels a lot more than two years in the role, but a lot of the moves that he's made have been bold and decisive and rooted in what is in the best interest of the baseball team. We're never going to shy away from big, bold decisions. We'll get a lot wrong, and hopefully get more right than wrong. And we'll keep adding trophies to that case and raising banners here in Fenway.”
Obviously, there’s a lot to chew on here. And the midday show did just that.
“Remember when we got Danny Jansen last year to be the righty stick, and those two scrubby relievers who we had to cut, and James Paxton who was always hurt?” Keefe asked sarcastically on Tuesday’s Jones and Keefe. “Remember the deadline last year? That was bold. A bold flavor by Craig Breslow.”
“This is something I've actually always defended Red Sox ownership on compared to the Patriots,” said Jones. “Compared to Kraft, all the Patriots ever did was win with Brady. Like, that's really not that difficult to win with the greatest player of all time. Tampa literally did it the second they got him. So like, it's not that hard to win with Brady.
“In the Red Sox defense, they have won with different [people] - they weren't all with [David] Ortiz, they weren't all with Mookie Betts. There were different managers, different GMs. So I will defend the Red Sox on that. [But] it falls a little flat, Sam Kennedy, when you made the playoffs once since your last World Series, and you've been in last place a bunch of seasons, and last year you were .500. Like, it falls a little flat when you're so far removed from it. I get what he's saying, [but] that wasn't the moment to drop that trump card on the table.”
“[With] the Red Sox, sometimes it does get forgotten how many World Series they've won in this stretch because the last place finishes kind of take a toll on you as a fan,” said Keefe. “But what a wild answer. He's talking about how Breslow won a World Series with the team [as a player in 2013] in defense of trading Mookie Betts and Devers, who were - no offense to Craig - bigger factors in their most recent World Series.
“‘We traded Betts and Devers, and we will stack up our wins against anybody.’ Yeah, those guys were a big part of it. Betts was an MVP. Devers was one of the youngest players to do all these different things on that run. They won in ’18, [but] they've been bad since."
Through the course of his frustration with this answer from Kennedy, Keefe joined Jones in finding another parallel between the end of the Patrios’ dynasty and the current messaging coming out of Fenway Park.
“This is similar [to] Bill Belichick towards the end,” said Keefe. “And this is also something we kind of made fun of at the time. I forget which bad season it was after - it might have been going into his final year. Somebody asked him during camp, ‘Hey, what would you say to fans about this season?’ Or something along those lines. And he basically was like, ‘Well, it's been 20 pretty good seasons. There haven’t been a lot of lean years around here.’
“He was saying that to show why we should feel good about this upcoming season, ‘because we used to be good.’ That doesn't work, especially when - in the Patriots case - you used to be good with Tom Brady. And in the Red Sox case, you used to be good with Mookie Betts, Rafael Devers, and all these other guys that are no longer with the team, let alone guys like Pedro [Martinez] and Manny [Ramirez]. If you're counting those wins - like, Pedro's in the Hall of Fame he's been out of the league for so long. So if you want to talk about what your record is since ’04, great. What is it since ’19?
“Well, Twitch chat made a good point,” Jones pointed out. “They're now ‘27 rings, bro.’ They're now the Uncle Rico [from Napoleon Dynamite].”
Great call by the Twitch chat, who Jones identified as someone with the username “Rather Be Golfing.”
You might rather be golfing, but you came up with two great comps.
To explain both, for the uninitiated:
“27 rings, bro:”
Heard more regularly in the mid 2010s, this was a common argument/phrase made by both the Yankees front office as well as Yankees fans when trying to defend their team in any argument. Sure, the organization has only won one World Series this millennium (2009) despite routinely having the first-or-second highest payroll in baseball.
So what?
They’ve won 27 World Series, guys! They know what they’re doing! How dare you criticize the Bronx Bombers! Kiss the rings!
As New York is now 16 years removed from their last title, this phrase is now rarely heard. Yankees fans have become apoplectic about their lack of rings post-2009, with their 5th inning meltdown in last year’s World Series being the perfect encapsulation of what Yankees baseball has become in the modern age.
Bloated payrolls, dominant regular seasons, disappointing postseasons, and WFAN phonelines full of near-expletives aimed at Brian Cashman and Aaron Boone.
And as much as Fenway Sports Group wants to pretend like 2018 was yesterday…it wasn’t.
When your most recent World Series win came almost two years before we knew what COVID was, you can’t use that to prop yourself up any longer.
Looking for cover behind a World Series ring from seven years ago is just as bad as clinging to 81% of your World Series wins occurring before Ronald Reagan was president.
Uncle Rico:
Honestly, just watch this clip.
Shortly after Kennedy and Breslow’s Zoom call, the Red Sox took the field for their first game post-Devers.
They beat the Mariners 2-0, and have now won 9 of their last 11 games.
But no matter how much winning this team is able to do on their extended west coast road trip, the questions surrounding Devers being traded to the Giants are going nowhere.