This Red Sox Trade Made Craig Breslow ‘A Little Bit Uncomfortable’

The Red Sox made a surprise move very early into the 2025 season.

Boston traded Quinn Priester to the Milwaukee Brewers only 10 games into the campaign. Priester isn’t a household name (yet) by any means, but at one point in spring training, he seemed like a legitimate candidate to crack Alex Cora’s Opening Day roster. The Red Sox also saw enough in the 26-year-old to give up a top prospect — 2020 first-round pick Nick Yorke — to acquire him last summer.

Thus, it wasn’t exactly easy for Craig Breslow to pull the trigger on the transaction.

“It’s always a little bit uncomfortable to trade starting pitching depth, especially someone young with controllable upside,” Breslow told reporters, per MassLive. “But last year, I think our system was so skewed toward position players that it would have been unthinkable (to do something like this in April of 2024).”

However, Breslow thought the Priester trade was an indication of a favorable spot Boston is in with its farm system and robust pitching group.

“I think (the trade) is significant for a lot of reasons,” Breslow told reporters. “One, any time you give up controllable starting pitching, there’s massive risk on both sides that go along with that. But I do think it speaks to us being in a different position, just in terms of the quality of depth that we have that we think is capable of contributing in the short term.

“It made sense for us to (acquire Priester) at the last deadline where Nick Yorke is a really good player but maybe didn’t have the clearest path to contribute here. And then based on some of the transactions that we made over the winter, some of the steps forward guys have made here, we felt like this was an opportunity for us to add future value that we couldn’t ignore.”

While the Red Sox didn’t enjoy much on-field success in recent years, so much work done behind the scenes over that span helped accelerate the club’s rebuild. And now with so much depth at so many premier positions, Boston is in a position of power when it comes to wheeling and dealing.