The 2025 MLB Trade Deadline came and went, and the Red Sox made no significant moves to bolster their team for the stretch run of the season.
The two deadline-adjacent moves made by Boston were a trade for left-handed reliever Steven Matz (3.44 ERA) of the Cardinals in exchange for minor league first baseman Blaze Jordan on Wednesday night, and a trade made just minutes before the deadline for Dodgers right-handed starter Dustin May (6-7, 4.85 ERA) in exchange for minor leaguers Zach Ehrhard and James Tibbs - the latter acquired from the Giants in the Rafael Devers trade on Father’s Day.
While getting an arm for the bullpen was a need for a 59-51 ballclub firmly in the thick of the playoff race in the American League, higher on the wish list for Red Sox fans was a true No. 2 starter and a trustworthy bat that could potentially play first base. And while May gives Boston more rotational depth, he's nowhere near that second horse fans have been clamoring for.
Instead, the Sox will have to forge ahead with what they’ve got, hoping that the first base platoon of Romy Gonzalez and Abraham Toro continues to hold up, and a player like Brayan Bello (7-5, 3.19 ERA) continues to mature before our eyes and becomes a reliable arm behind Garrett Crochet (12-4, 2.23 ERA) during Boston’s playoff push.
An hour after the deadline concluded, Red Sox chief baseball officer Craig Breslow met with the media on Zoom.
And like the large majority of Red Sox Nation, Breslow seemed disappointed with his front office’s performance on Thursday as well.
“I understand the frustration and the disappointment because we’re all looking at the last week right now in terms of the trades that were made and weren’t made,” said Breslow. “And there’s not a lot of sympathy for how hard we tried to get deals across the line, I understand that.
“We believe that we have a really young, exciting, talented team, and one that is capable of continuing to perform at this level and make it to the postseason, and that’s what our focus is on. And there’s decisions that were made at this deadline, they weren’t driven by an unwillingness to be aggressive. They weren’t driven by taking a highlighted or reinforced view of 2026 or 2027. We were aggressively pursuing acquisitions that could help us in 2025. They didn’t line up.
“But I think if fans were in the office during this deadline, they would see guys that we maybe didn’t expect to be willing to talk about going into these conversations, we made available. And we tried to put the most aggressive offers that we could and hoped that they were gonna end in deals. And sometimes they did and sometimes they don’t.”
Just two days before the deadline, manager Alex Cora carried a tune that had Sox fans thinking Thursday would produce fireworks at Fenway on the trade market.
“The expectations are for us to be better or to improve the team in the upcoming days,” Cora told WEEI Afternoons on Tuesday. “That's not a guarantee that we're going to be better, but the hope is that we improve the team, and then we keep playing good baseball.”
Adding Matz at the expense of a Rule 5 prospect does make Boston better. And this same sentiment can be applied to May, too. But you’re being dishonest if you think that’s what Cora meant by these comments on Tuesday.
The team got better without losing talent on the major league roster, and Breslow made sure to highlight this when talking with the media on Thursday night.
“I think over the last two to three weeks, it became clear that all 26 guys on our roster were contributing to what we were doing,” said Breslow. “And we weren’t willing to take a hit to our major league team and potentially impact the 2025 season in favor of trying to repackage or repurpose in a way that might of improved the future.
“And there weren’t really opportunities to both trade off of our major league team and improve our 2025 outlook, so we felt like it was best to kind of leave that group as it was, and try to use what I think is a strong and deep system to try to improve the team. And I think with Dustin [May] and Steven [Matz], we did that. But in some other pursuits - like I said, it wasn’t from an unwillingness to talk about anybody in our system.”
One move that would have definitively made the roster better would have been the addition of Twins starting pitcher Joe Ryan (10-5, 2.82 ERA).
30 minutes before the 6:00 p.m. ET deadline, Jon Morosi of MLB Network reported on X that the Red Sox "had made a late effort to acquire" Ryan, a player that's been linked to Boston for over a month with fuel added to that fire after an Instagram post from Alex Bregman during All-Star Weekend in Atlanta.
But despite that late push, the Red Sox were unable to get a deal done for the 29-year-old All-Star righty who would have slotted in perfectly as the team's No. 2 starter.
“We’re happy with the guys that we brought in, but we also pursued real impact players that we felt like could improve our team in ’25 and beyond,” said Breslow. “We were uncomfortably aggressive in trying to pursue them, and the players that we were willing to put into deals - and ultimately, it wasn’t from a lack of effort. Other teams needed to say, ‘hey, that’s enough,’ or, ‘that crosses the line.’
“But like I said, it wasn’t about an unwillingness to talk about our full system. And I think in a lot of ways, the deals that we made - talking about the Crochet deal as an example as a willingness to give up some of our best young players to improve our major league team. That was instructive in terms of how we approached this deadline. But ultimately, we didn’t line up with other teams in those pursuits.”
The post-deadline Red Sox will be back in action on Friday for a weekend series against the Astros (62-47). First pitch is scheduled for 7:10 p.m. ET with Hunter Brown (9-5, 2.54 ERA) on the mound for Houston.
No word at the moment on who will be taking the bump for Boston.
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