OPINION By Kalvin Tragethon

  The Red Sox hope to finally redeem themselves with their new Chief Baseball Officer, Craig Breslow.

  After two consecutive last place finishes in the AL East, the Red Sox are in desperate need of a new voice in the front office, and Craig Breslow is just that. From 2012-2015, Breslow was a pitcher for the Red Sox, appearing in 202 games for the Sox over that time period. After retiring from Major League Baseball (MLB) in 2018, Breslow immediately came back to the game the following season, taking a job as the Chicago Cubs’ Director of Strategic Initiatives. He was eventually promoted to Assistant General Manager and Senior Vice President of Pitching in 2023.

  In the last decade, the Red Sox have had little success with finding pitchers who can compete at the major league level. Before the ascension of Bryan Bello this past season, the Red Sox have had trouble developing pitching talent, as they have only drafted two pitchers with sustained success for their organization in the last 15 years. John Lester pitched for the Red Sox from 2006-2014. During that time, Lester made two All-Star appearances in 2010 and 2011 and he was top five in Cy Young Award voting in 2010 for being one of the best pitchers in the American League. The other successful pitcher, Clay Buchholz, also appeared in two All-Star games in 2010 and 2013, and he was voted sixth in Cy Young Award voting in 2010. 

  The hope is that with Breslow’s experience in both pitching and helping to develop the position with the Chicago Cubs, he can help the Red Sox find more players like Lester and Buchholz to bolster the future pitching rotation in the organization. 

  The other hope for the Red Sox ownership in hiring Breslow is that he can install a new confidence in Red Sox players who had lost faith in the previous Chief Baseball Officer Chaim Bloom. Bloom had very little success in his four years with the Sox. At the trade deadlines in the 2022 and 2023 MLB seasons, Bloom failed to fill the Red Sox team needs when the season was hanging in the balance. Bloom got rid of locker-room favorite Catcher Christian Vasquez in 2022, which sent the team into a downward spiral after the deadline. In the past 3 seasons, the Red Sox have a combined record of 5-16 in the 7 games following the trade deadline, which ranks last in the MLB over that time period. This proves the distrust that the Red Sox had in their chief decision maker.

  Breslow is not going to be able to take the team back to Championships by himself. This is Breslow’s first time running a Major League Baseball operation, meaning that there will be many learning curves along the way. Breslow will also be at the mercy of Red Sox ownership, who will dictate how much money the first-year Baseball Officer will be able to spend on the team. According to Spotrac, the Red Sox were 13th out of 30 teams in league spending in 2023. This comes after the Red Sox ranked sixth in spending the two years prior. Despite this decrease in spending, the ticket prices for Sox games were the third highest in the league according to Statista. The lack of success combined with the high ticket prices have shown in the attendance numbers at Fenway Park. Prior to 2021, the Red Sox had consistently been in the top 10 in attendance for well over a decade. However, since 2020, the Red Sox have fallen out of the top 10 in attendance two times, showing that the fans are losing interest in the team. For a city that was once considered the biggest baseball market in America, the attendance falling below the top ten is a sad occurrence and says a lot about the fragile state of baseball in Boston. 

  If the Red Sox want to compete to get their fan base back, they are going to have to begin to compete for championships in the near future. In order to do this, it is going to take a Chief Baseball Officer who is going to make the right moves, and an ownership that recommits itself to the winning culture that Boston has enjoyed for so long.