The story of how Alex Bregman landed with the Red Sox

FORT MYERS, Fla. - There was one thing struck the Red Sox contingent when they ventured to Newport Beach for their meeting with Alex Bregman and his agent Scott Boras in mid-November: How curious he was about players who weren't even on the major league team.

Roman Anthony. Marcelo Mayer. Kristian Campbell. They were all part of the conversation. That surprised some, but also made the Sox' brass feel like this line of questioning might be a feather in their cap.

"That," said one Red Sox executive, "was somewhat unexpected."

And, after falling short on so many of these pursuits, the Sox knew they needed all the feathers they could get.

What they ultimately found out was that the entire package presented to Bregman - including the possession of three of MLB's top prospects - was the right one. It had been a long time since the Red Sox could say that.

Alex Bregman was introduced as a member of the Red Sox Sunday morning, having already connected with those three prospects over some in-between-workout eats. He was wearing a Red Sox uniform. He was talking about winning championships as a member of the Red Sox. And he was possessing a locker immediately next to those three 20-somethings that had initially piqued his interest three months before.

The road to land at this place (where he finds himself living in a spring training house owned by former Red Sox Christian Vazquez), however, was anything but a paved freeway to Fort Myers.

It was, as Boras later said, a unique situation.

There was that qualifying offer, forcing whatever team (with the exception of Houston) to surrender a draft pick if it signed the infielder. Interested teams also took vastly different approaches, with some wanting to draw the 30-year-old with more years while others wanted to woo him with a lot of money with less longevity to the contract. And, all along, there was the mystery surrounding what each of these competing clubs were doing.

What was clear starting from that November get-together, was that the Red Sox wanted to make Bregman a priority ... no matter what happened with another Boras' clients, Juan Soto.

"Bregman was always part of it," Boras said regarding the Red Sox' offseason focus. "There was never any point where he wasn’t. I don’t know what they would have done if Juan had signed here, but my clear impression was that they were pursuing him no matter what."

It was Boras who would routinely be wondering out loud what happened to the win-at-all-cost Red Sox over the past few years, remembering the days of the Sox almost never losing out of free agent pursuits. He felt the shift toward prioritizing sustainability over the here and the now. But in those early offseason conversations with ownership, he sensed things were shifting back.

"I think it was after Soto signed we had a discussion and I could tell from knowing John from back with the Marlins and such that he had a really onus about, ‘We need to really do things differently from what we have done before.’ Tom came out, we had dinner in LA and he voiced the same thing," the agent said. "I knew from the ownership level they they were really looking forward to correct what has happened the last five or six years."

But words and intentions were one thing. Actions were another, as was evidenced by the continued close-but-no-cigars courting of Soto and Max Fried. Bregman was going to be the ultimate litmus test.

Yet, there were a couple of obstacles for the Red Sox. For starters, they weren't alone in their infatuation with Bregman. Another issue was understanding who and what they were competing against.

One thing to know about negotiations with Boras is that he isn't going to definitively divulge other of offers, which was leaving interested teams like the Red Sox somewhat flying blind. They knew Bregman wanted a healthy amount of years on his deal, which only made since considering he was entering his Age 31 season. They also knew that their offer wasn't going to scratch that itch.

The Red Sox' plan was never going to include anything close to the six years Houston had reportedly presented. What was always going to possess was a lot of money in each of the years the contract did possess.

It was a gamble, but as the landscape unfolded it became increasingly possible the strategy might work.

They had heard Detroit might be the most motivated parties of them all, a notion that ultimately had plenty of merit to it as proven by the six-year, $171.5 million deal offered by the Tigers. This would have been a problem with one caveat - it was perceived the Sox that they had the upper-hand when it came to representing Bregman's desired destination.

The Blue Jays were also lumped in as a place that could land Bregman if they blew everyone out of the water with more years, although ultimately their interest seemed vague more than others. And the Astros were bobbing and weaving their way through the offseason, declaring that Bregman was out of their picture after acquiring Christian Walker and Isaac Paredes only to resurface as a reported interested party in late January.

"Houston knows who this player is and what he means," Boras explained when asked about the Astros' up-and-down interest. "And it’s kind of a credit to them that they continued to keep their toe in the water to try and get this kind of player because in many ways they are irreplaceable. Durable. Plays at a high level. Big moment player. Championship player. To have a player with a skillset with all the leadership aspects, I just think you just keep on thinking, ‘Where are we going to find a replacement.’ I think organizations that know him, I think they have a difficulty letting that go."

Then there were the Cubs.

While some with the Red Sox still feared the Tigers infatuation with Bregman was going to make it impossible for him to turn his back on Detroit, others in the Sox' organization viewed Chicago as their biggest competition. Like the Red Sox, they weren't going to be offering years, but also like the Red Sox, they weren't going to be afraid to offer money and financial creativity.

So when Boras insinuated to the Red Sox that last week was going to meet rubber-meets-the-road time when it came to Bregman making a decision, a final level of discomfort was needed.

The phone call from Bregman's MLB idol Dustin Pedroia was nice. ("Just talked to him about what it's like to play there, the city and how great it is!" - Pedroia explained in a text to WEEI.com.) And so were the other rounds of recruitment from such current players as Trevor Story and Garrett Crochet. But other teams had executed similar recruiting tools, while also presenting similarly intriguing contract offers. This was the ultimate fork-in-the-road moment.

The Red Sox decided they were going to acquiesce to something they had pushed back on throughout the entire process. They were going to let Bregman have the opportunity to opt-out of the contract after either of the first two years of the three-year contract.

And while news that Bregman's wife had been accepted to an entrepreneurial program at Harvard just a few days before he agreed to the Red Sox' offer - (a nugget that the Sox folks had no idea about) - the feeling was that the opt-outs were the difference-maker.

"I was talking to (Craig Breslow) last night, and I think he old me he had 77 appearances in a season one time. That’s pretty remarkable. Well, I think he may have led in GM phone calls to me, and it might have been 14 or 15 of them, persistent discussions, talk. John (Henry), Tom (Werner, all actively involved calls. Tom at 3:30 in the morning from England. I think they had their eyes on AB as far as kind of the perfect fit. For baseball people, when you do this over time, you always look at success points, and having a 1.200 OPS at Fenway was a very strong driving point for me, as far as certainly acknowledging what kind of career future Alex could have,"

It wasn't easy, but the Red Sox finally got their guy.

And now that guy can meet these other guys he had been so curious about during that meeting in Southern California.

"In 24 hours, he’s impacted the organization already," Cora said. "Just see him walking into the clubhouse, walking into the office and talking baseball is refreshing, it’s great. And, one thing he's going to do, he's going to challenge everybody here, I know that, he's going to challenge us. He's going to, ask about pitch usage, swing decisions, about scouting reports, the nutrition side of it. You know, he will do that. Not in a bad way. He wants to learn, he wants to be involved. And that's very important. And I think, in 24 hours, his teammates, the coaching staff, the front office have seen why I’ve been talking about him for a long period of time. This kid gets it, he caught my attention in 2017 and throughout the years, he keeps evolving. He's getting better. And the most important thing he wants to win. That's it. For him it’s his family, it’s baseball and winning. And, I'm excited to have him here."