Why Craig Breslow (Or Someone Like Him) Makes Sense For Red Sox

In some ways, Ryan Brasier is a focal point of this crucial Red Sox offseason.

The former Boston reliever was invaluable to the 2018 World Series club. Yet, Brasier’s performance dropped off in the seasons that followed, especially as he logged more and more innings.

Brasier’s career hit a low in 2023. The Red Sox designated him for assignment, releasing him in May with a 7.29 ERA in 20 games. Brasier eventually caught on with the Dodgers, who scooped him up in early June. Five weeks after his final appearance with the Red Sox, Brasier debuted with Los Angeles, throwing 1 1/3 scoreless innings. He allowed just three earned runs over 38 2/3 frames down the stretch, and opposing hitters hit just .140 against him. LA went 27-12 in games he appeared.

So, what happened? How could Brasier go from potentially being done as a big leaguer to being a lights-out bullpen arm for one of baseball’s best teams? The Dodgers saw something in Brasier. They got him into their system and encouraged him to throw a cutter, something he didn’t do in Boston. It obviously worked. Opposing hitters hit .152 against the pitch, and it also freed up some other things in Brasier’s delivery and repertoire that got him on the right track.

Other factors go into the resurgence, too, and simply saying the Red Sox failed with Brasier where the Dodgers excelled is too simple. But the Dodgers’ ability to help get Brasier turned around is the hallmark of an organization that excels when it comes to identifying pitchers and having an idea of how to help them perform at their very best.

So, it makes sense that Chicago Cubs assistant general manager Craig Breslow is reportedly on Boston’s radar for one of its front office openings. The Boston Globe’s Alex Speier on Thursday reported the club has been “in advanced discussions” with Breslow, who is among the leading candidates for a role in Boston’s baseball operations department.

Breslow, a reliever on the 2013 Red Sox club that won the World Series, has enjoyed a remarkably quick rise up the organizational ladder in Chicago. Theo Epstein hand-picked the Yale graduate to join the club in 2019, when he took a role as a data-driven analyst focused on pitching. That eventually earned him a promotion to director of pitching, and he was again promoted in 2020 to assistant general manager and vice president of pitching.

The Cubs have had varying levels of success on the mound since hiring Breslow, but the 2023 campaign was their best yet. All five of the Cubs’ starters made at least 23 starts despite having just one starter making north of $15 million, and that was Marcus Stroman, who was an All-Star. The Cubs also saw 27-year-old Justin Steele blossom into a borderline ace, and the left-hander should get Cy Young Award votes in a few weeks.

Additionally, the Cubs have two pitching prospects ranked in MLB.com’s top-100 list, and four of their top 10 organizational prospects are pitchers. Just two Red Sox pitchers rank in the club’s top 10 and both are miles from the top-100 list.

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Pitching isn’t the only area of improvement for the Red Sox under the new regime, but it’s certainly the most important if the club wants to contend for World Series again soon. They need better pitchers, and they need a lot of them. The Red Sox just needed to use 17 starters in 2023, and a lot of them were out of their element in starting for Boston.

The Red Sox need to get to a point where a starter or two missing a turn doesn’t throw the entire staff into disarray for a week. That was the sort of thing the Cubs were able to excel at under Breslow’s watch.

“It’s critically important. The fact that when one of the pitchers you mentioned is injured and we need to bring up a starter, that we were able to have a debate over who the right person was, just shows the progress we’ve made,” Breslow said on Marquee Sports Network’s “Cubs Weekly Podcast” last October. ” … Now the fact that we can debate this is exactly where we need to be. We need to not know who the top pitching prospect is. We need to know that there is a ton of future major league contributors at every affiliate and we’ll continue to try to develop all of those with the same rigor and the same enthusiasm as we would if we all could get behind a single one.”

There are many ways to do that, and the best teams are the ones who not only are able to identify talent but can also identify how they can best augment a player to unlock their maximum potential.

“I think it is a kind of consistent, scalable, repeatable process to identify pitchers for whom we believe we have some developmental unlocks — whether that’s a tweak to the delivery, tweak to the repertoire or a tweak to the usage — and very early on presenting those to the players such that kind of implicit to agreeing to come here is buying into the recommendations that we have,” Breslow said on the same podcast.

Breslow doesn’t have experience in running a baseball ops department, so hiring him to sit in the big chair at Fenway Park is a bit of a risk. But given how badly the Red Sox need to improve their ability to identify and develop pitching, Breslow — or someone like him — sure makes a lot of sense.