Appearing on the Greg Hill Show Thursday morning, Red Sox chief baseball officer Craig Breslow addressed some key topics regarding his team now that it has been eliminated from postseason consideration.
DID BRESLOW VIEW THIS ROSTER AS A WORLD SERIES CONTENDER?
"I think there were a number of times during the season where we were playing really good baseball. We were pitching well. We were scoring a bunch of runs. Sure, the defense at times let us down. But we were playing with teams the baseball world viewed as World Series contenders. By measure, being able to play with the Yankees, and play with the Phillies, and play with the Guardians, yeah, I think we were capable of that. Obviously, you need to get in to be able to do that and we didn’t. But I think over the course of 159 games we saw some of our deficiencies and we have some holes we need to address, but we also saw the core of a really exciting team."
WHAT WILL BE HIS CHIEF TARGETS THIS OFFSEASON?
"I think we need to figure out how to balance out our lineup. Obviously, it’s left-handed heavy and a number of our young players who will be impacting the big league club shortly are also left-handed. I think we need to figure out how we balance that out to not leave ourselves so susceptible to left-handed pitching. We can never have enough starting pitching. We can never have enough quality starting pitching so I think looking at starting pitching is the other area of focus for us."
WILL OWNERSHIP BE WILLING TO SPEND?
"The commitment from ownership to get the Red Sox, to get us where we need to go is there, is strong. It’s up to me, up to the rest of the front office to figure out what opportunities we need to pursue. I don[t have any question about ownership’s willingness to do what we need to do to put the Red Sox back where we belong."
WHY HAVE THE RED SOX CONSISTENTLY STRUGGLED IN THE FINAL MONTHS OF THE LAST THREE SEASONS?
"We’re looking at a bunch of different explanations for that. One thing it seems is it’s not luck in that when this happens time after time we have to start to think there is something we can do, or something that we’re not doing. So we’re looking at monitoring workload and understanding whether or not we’re asking more of guys than they are equipped to handle and if that means we need to change offseason conditioning or in-seasn workloads … One thing we can point to is overall organizational depth in that when some of our key relievers went down we had a handful of guys who were able to step up. And at times we had a pretty significant drop-off in talent in terms of who was ready to come up and contribute. Overall, improving the organizational depth, especially on the pitching side, it’s something we can point to as one way we can overcome the struggles that we have had in the second half."