Welcome back to our 2025 Red Sox Postmortem. After talking about the thinks we loved and hated yesterday, today we’re taking a look at management.
On a scale of 1 (Harry Frazee) to 5 (Theo Epstein), how would you rate Craig Breslow’s last 12 months?
So the answer here is a three, but it’s because it’s a mixture of moves you could grade as fives and ones. Breslow is like a hitter who strikes out 30 percent of the time but also has the power to hit 50 home runs.
The single biggest thing he did was get Garrett Crochet. Not only did he select the right guy, get a trade done, and extend him, but he also
did it as a pivot from the Yankees winning the bidding war for Max Fried when they went to an eighth year on the contract. Even more amazing is that Breslow completed the trade for Carlos Narvaez right before dealing for Crochet because he knew Kyle Teel was going to be in the upcoming transaction. So he filled the void at catcher that was opening up and still managed to land Crochet without touching Roman Anthony or Marcelo Mayer. This was a masterclass!
Unfortunately, the trade deadline this summer was, uh ….. to put it as nicely as possible, something less than a masterclass. Between moving on from Quinn Priester and Rafael Devers early in the season, Breslow actually shipped out more major league talent this season than he brought in, which is nuts for a team that was in a playoff race.
— Matthew Gross
I put him right in the middle with a three. I will say right upfront that I feel a lot better than in 2024. There were some huge moves (and non-moves!) and sometimes it’s hard to parse who is responsible—that is, how much is Craig Breslow simply executing what John Henry has ordered, yada yada yada. I can’t blame him entirely if he wasn’t allowed to go out and spend more money, or if he was instructed to ditch Devers immediately, no matter what. What I can blame him for is the Quinn Priester trade, his infuriating statements in press conferences, and the way he seems to intimidate staff in meetings to seem to arrive at consensus.
But I have to thank him for getting Garrett Crochet. And extending Roman Anthony. Sure, he needed the financial authorization from Henry, so his success is intertwined with the vision of our owners, but he made it happen. My 3 has the potential to balloon in the offseason and in subsequent years.
— Maura McGurk
I’ll say three as well. The big offseason moves were successful. Garrett Crochet was the most important player on the team, Alex Bregman was the veteran they needed, and Aroldis Chapman was dominant at the back of the bullpen. Roman Anthony was also signed to a pre-arbitration extension, which is a relief.
The in-season acquisitions are where I dock points. The Devers situation was handled poorly, and while I might be the only Jordan Hicks believer remaining, the return still doesn’t feel like enough for a player of Devers’ caliber. On top of that, the trade deadline was a fiasco. Steven Matz was great, but everyone knew they needed another arm, and the arm they got was hardly a reliable one. I’ll retroactively give this a 3.5 if Breslow never trades for a Dodgers pitcher again. If the Dodgers don’t want him, there’s probably a good reason.
— Jacob Roy
I have a problem with Likert scales, which give people the out of defaulting to three. It’s easily the best option here because the Red Sox in 2025 were a very good, exciting, flawed team. So I’m going to pretend three isn’t available and give Craig Breslow a two. Not that I believe he should be fired — he shouldn’t — but because he failed to sove a big problem. The success of the starting rotation was dependent on a guy who never pitched a full season in Crochet (worked out), a guy who had half a Cy Young-caliber season followed by second half collapse in Tanner Houck (didn’t work), a guy coming off of surgery in Lucas Giolito (mostly worked), and a guy who lead the league in home runs in Kutter Crawford (missed the season unexpectedly but early). His answers to these question marks were to hope Patrick Sandoval came back (he didn’t), hope Walker Buehler bounced back (he didn’t), and then hope Dustin May — who flashed basically all the warning signs we’e already discussed here — bounced back while setting a career high in innings (he didn’t).
I’m not saying emptying the farm for Joe Ryan was the answer; it wasn’t. But Trevor Story was healthy, the prospects came up and produced, and the reshaped bullpen worked. That was the main success, and that’s not nothing. But if Alex Bregman, who kinda has to balance out Devers, leaves, then Breslow as of today is hanging his hat very much on Chapman and Romy Gonzalez in terms of additions.
—Mike Carlucci
He gets a four based on the Garrett Crochet trade and extension alone. In fact, he could’ve pawned the 2004 World Series trophy, hired Ron DeSantis to replace Paul Toboni, and sold Roman Anthony to fund the production of No, No, Nanette 2: Fine, Nanette, Yes, Sure, Whatever and I would still give him a four — that’s how important it is to aggressively pursue elite starting pitching, a lesson the previous front entirely ignored in the name of risk management.
Having said that… man, he made two major blunders that cost this team a lot of wins. First, he greatly mismanaged the Rafael Devers situation and failed to address the roster crunch he himself created by signing Alex Bregman. And second, he had no plan whatsoever to integrate one of the best offensive players in the entire organization the entire league into the big league team. If both Rafael Devers and Roman Anthony had played a full season in Boston, this team would have won the division. And in trading Devers, all he’s done is give him one more thing to do this offseason that he wouldn’t otherwise need to do (acquire a power bat).
Every GM/POBO/CBO/Whatever makes moves that don’t work out — you can find examples of the Quinn Priester trade all over the league. But the Devers and Anthony blunders were foreseeable, unforced errors that a more experienced CBO would’ve avoided.
— Dan Secatore
On a scale of 1 (Bobby Valentine) to 5 (Terry Francona) how would you rate Alex Cora’s 2025 performance?
Four (so John Farrell I guess? Jimy Williams?). A baseball manager’s job from February through September is about man-management first and foremost, keeping the whole roster engaged and focused. By all accounts, Cora excels at that. It’s easy to complain about some of his regular season usage patterns, and I’ll admit to continuing to be frustrated at the amount of errors and boneheaded plays this team makes. But every team makes plenty of boneheaded plays over the course of 162 games and I’m not going to blame Cora for Trevor Story’s throwing arm or the fact that Kristian Campbell was rushed to the big leagues before he learned a defensive position.
I’m not giving him a five because I think he played a major role in the mismanaged Rafael Devers situation (see below) but ultimately, I can’t think of anyone who would be an obvious improvement over Cora. And I loved his aggressiveness in Game 2 against the Yankees. He knew this was a depleted team that would struggle to hit in general and pitch on non-Crochet days, and so he took a gamble to try to push them further than they probably had any right to go.
—Dan Secatore
I’ll say a three-and-a-half, and I’d echo a lot of what our fearless leader said above while docking an extra half-point for the boneheaded plays that we continue to see. Too many years of that buffoonery at this point, but I do agree with the sentiment that you won’t be able to find any obvious improvement. I’m still a Cora guy. He had his icky moments, but he also had some strokes of genius—and it’s tough to blame him for the injury luck or any holes on the roster.
— Fitzy Mo Peña
I don’t think he’s a worse manager than he was in 2018 or 2021 and the front office/ownership gave him nothing in 2022-2023 and then again at the deadline in 2024. I’ll say he’s a four. Players like him and he’s not obviously losing games (I know this is poking the bear).
—Mike Carlucci
Three. He could only play the cards that he was dealt, and for the fourth straight year I don’t think he was given a great hand. However, his team led the league in errors again this season and, combined with some horrific baserunning through the first half of the season specifically, many of us were left wondering if the fundamental side of things is being emphasized enough on this team. There were too many lackluster efforts throughout the course of the season, including being shutout in the final game of the playoffs.
—Bob Osgood
For me, three-and-a-half. As others have said, he’s a players’ manager, and he’s good at that. I’m really worn out by issues with fundamentals, though. I’m thinking of really dumb baserunning, leading the league in errors (or coming damn close, like in 2024), and particularly the near-collisions we’ve been treated to recently. I’ve heard people blame the entire minor-league system for this, saying that fundamentals are being pushed aside in favor of teaching launch angles (for example) but I feel like the buck stops with Cora. If he wanted to see better fundamentals, he’d make sure that happened.
Also, since I don’t know who else to blame for this, I’ll say that the players need a better visualization coach, or sports psychologist, or whatever. They had so much trouble bringing in base runners, or snapping out of team-wide cold streaks. That may be only Cora-adjacent, but I don’t know where else to point the finger here.
—Maura McGurk
Are you confident in the overall direction of the club?
Yes, but it’s almost entirely because of the kids. The Sox brought up Kristian Campbell in March, Hunter Dobbins in April, Marcelo Mayer in May, Roman Anthony in June, Jhostynxon Garcia in August, and Payton Tolle and Connelly Early in September. This is the core of exciting players that will take the Red Sox into the rest of the decade, and we probably won’t ever see a single season where so much talent hits the major league club in such a short window ever again.
They’ve got the hard part done. Now the front office and ownership needs to make sure they don’t blow it!
— Matthew Gross
Yes. I’m making some assumptions though. I’m assuming that ownership and Craig Breslow will follow up on their recent enthusiasm for making bigger deals by making more of them. We’re going to need that pitching, for example; we may need a new third baseman, and more. I’m assuming that there will be a return to health for at least some of our injured players, or that the front office will make contingency plans for dealing with that. I’m assuming that the team of youngsters will continue to gel and gain experience. There’s also a hope thrown in there, which is that if Alex Bregman doesn’t stay, someone (probably from outside the organization) will step in as a mentor and example for the young players. That was invaluable in 2025 and we still need it.
— Maura McGurk
Connelly Early showed up out of nowhere and pitched an elimination game. It didn’t go great, but the fact that it wasn’t a total disaster is a testament to the pitching development pipeline. So yes, I am confident.
— Jacob Roy
Yes. But the commitment can’t end here. There are a thousand uncertainties and issues and a fully healthy Roman Anthony can’t paper over all of them. Don’t turn this team into the Cleveland Guardians with one good player and luck as the strategy.
—Mike Carlucci
I’m confident in Craig Breslow, Alex Cora, and the base of young talent in the organization. I’m not confident in ownership. My worry is that what we saw this year — an exciting team that engaged the fanbase and squeaked into the playoffs, and did it without one of the league’s top payrolls — is exactly what their new business model aims for.
— Dan Secatore
