When Red Sox chief baseball officer Craig Breslow called in to The Greg Hill Show Friday morning, he was greeted by boos from fans in attendance for the show’s live broadcast at Pier 52 in Fall River.
It was a crystal-clear expression of the disappointment Boston fans feel after the Red Sox’ quiet trade deadline, which saw them add pitchers Dustin May and Steven Matz but not any true impact players.
Breslow himself said Thursday night that he understood that disappointment, but that hasn’t exactly softened the blow. Adding to fans’ frustration was Ken Rosenthal, one of baseball’s top insiders, characterizing the Red Sox’ deadline as an “epic fail” and their pursuit of Minnesota Twins ace Joe Ryan as “feeble at best.”
Greg Hill asked Breslow if he disagrees with that assessment. Listen to the full interview above.
“I would strongly disagree with that, yes,” Breslow responded.
While Breslow wouldn’t comment any further on Ryan in particular, he continued to reiterate that he was aggressive and did not make any prospects untouchable in his pursuit of better trade targets.
“While I am not going to get into too much detail about specific pursuits, everything that I said last night is true. We approached the deadline trying to identify impact additions that could bolster this team given what we have been able to do on the field thus far, the position that we're in, and the promise of a playoff push and deep postseason run, and we weren't able to line up,” Breslow said. “But in order to add impact players, particularly impact starting pitching, we had to take the position that we'd be willing to talk about anybody in our system, and we were. But that doesn't guarantee that you're going to line up with another team in order to get a deal across the line.”
Regardless of whether Breslow genuinely believes he was aggressive enough in his pursuit of impact players, it seems like other teams – including the Twins when it comes to Ryan – did not. That notion is supported by a post on X from MassLive’s Chris Cotillo, who reported that “the Red Sox thought they were getting somewhere but Twins people didn’t think so.”
Chris Curtis asked Breslow if it’s possible he overrated his own prospects in these negotiations with other teams.
“We really like our minor league players,” Breslow said. “Is it possible that we like them more than other teams? Sure. Probably because we acquired them, we have relationships with them. But I do think that we have a number of conversations inside the office, in our deadline room, about what our goal is and what we're trying to accomplish, and that's to win the World Series. And we have to be willing to get uncomfortable with trading some of our young players in order to do that. And I think the most important thing is that we were. It just didn't work out this deadline.”
In the end, regardless of the why, that last line really sums it up well: “It just didn’t work out this deadline.” And now we’ll all wait and see how the rest of this Red Sox season works out.