After getting swept by the Los Angeles Angels, the Boston Red Sox have now lost five in a row and sit 2.5 games out of the final AL wild card spot.
It once again raises the uncomfortable question about what this team does before the trade deadline. Red Sox chief baseball officer Craig Breslow was adamant that trading away Rafael Devers was not a white flag being waved on the 2025 season. But if things don’t turn around over the next few weeks, that’s how it may be remembered. Trade rumors involving the likes of Jarren Duran, Aroldis Chapman and even Alex Bregman have already begun to swirl.
On Thursday’s “Front Office Report” on The Greg Hill Show, however, Breslow again insisted that he is looking to add to, and not subtract from, this Red Sox team. Listen to the full interview above.
“There's obviously a lot of baseball between now and then, but we absolutely went into this season with the expectation that we were going to compete,” Breslow said. “And looking to the trade deadline as an opportunity to bolster the team, that's still where our heads are. We want to add to this team. We want to improve our chances down the stretch, because we still think that this is a team that's capable of making a deep postseason run, and it's one that we believe in.”
Breslow said that both the financial flexibility created by the Devers trade and the team’s farm system could be leveraged before the July 31 deadline.
“Now, the trade deadline doesn't operate the same way as free agency, so dollars are certainly helpful in that they provide flexibility and they give us the opportunity to maybe go down paths that we wouldn't have been able to otherwise, but so does the deep farm system,” he said. “And so, I think there are going to be a number of different ways that we can improve the team come the deadline.”
Later in the interview, Breslow again made it clear that if the deadline were today, the Red Sox would be buyers, not sellers.
“We would be looking to improve our team,” he said “We'd be looking to improve our team for 2025, because despite the fact that we haven't been able to string together the consistent performance that we think we're capable of, we're still very much staring down wild card chances, and nobody has really run away with the AL East. And so, as we start to get healthy, and we start to look externally about ways that we can improve the team, we think we've got a good chance to make a deep, deep postseason run.”
If those improvements don’t come sooner than later, though, the Red Sox may very well find themselves sliding out of contention and into the sellers category. Whether Breslow feels the urgency to add well before July 31 or just sits back to see how things play out remains to be seen.