On Thursday, Red Sox chief baseball officer Craig Breslow joined The Greg Hill Show as a part of their weekly “Front Office Report” segment, as his baseball team narrowly escaped being swept at Fenway Park on Wednesday, beating the fourth-place Angels 11-9 on the shortest walk-off home run of the Statcast era.
A win is a win, but when you consider the team had lost 8 of its last 10 games heading into Wednesday, and that team now sits at 30-34 overall leading into a weekend series in the Bronx 10 games behind the Yankees, it’s fair to wonder if a change in philosophy from leadership is needed in a clubhouse that has produced a record of 267-283 since losing in the ALCS in 2021.
Take starting pitcher Garrett Crochet, for example.
Inarguably the biggest prize for the organization this offseason after being acquired in a trade from the White Sox, Crochet has lived up to the hype in 2025.
Through 13 starts, Crochet is 5-4 with a 1.98 ERA, good for sixth in all of baseball. He’s already amassed 101 strikeouts through two months of pitching, good for second in all of baseball. And if you’re into this type of thing, he’s currently sporting a career-low 1.06 WHIP and has a WAR of 2.7.
There’s a reason the team signed him to a six-year extension in April worth $170 million.
He is, as our friend Lou Merloni has said on many occasions, “filthy.”
With that said, the team has been extremely cautious about allowing the 25-year-old to pitch late into games, with manager Alex Cora explaining recently that the team is still looking to manage his workload. With last season being the only time in his career that he’s pitched the workload of a normal big league starter (146.0 IP in 32 starts), the team has been focused on playing the long game with their ace - most notably pulling Crochet after just 5.1 innings against the Mets on May 21.
But with where things stand for Boston as of June 5, Breslow said the team needs to be open to reassessing how they’re managing Crochet moving forward.
“Have you reevaluated the approach in terms of whether it's workload for Crochet, or in-game strategy, considering you're now 30-34 and the season could spiral?” asked WEEI’s Chris Curtis. “Do you have to reevaluate just the day-to-day approach because of where you find yourself in the standings?”
“I think we do,” said Breslow. “And I think we want to balance the information that we have available to us each day that could affect that night's game with keeping one eye, at least, on the longer term.
“And we saw with Crochet - obviously, he had the shortened start against New York based on some information that we had available to us, and the other side of that was being able to push him in a game against Atlanta deeper than he had previously. And that's the balance. I think it's imperfect, and in all of these decisions, they warrant questioning. But whether it's me or Alex or anybody else, we're making the best decisions that we can with the information that we have in front of us.”
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