The Red Sox’s most glaring need entering this offseason is pitching and a former big league pitcher will be in charge of fixing it.
Boston has hired Craig Breslow — a 43-year-old Yale grad who pitched in 576 big league games from 2005-17 — as its new chief baseball officer. He comes to the Red Sox from the Cubs where he served as assistant GM and vice president of pitching.
Breslow will need to add at least three starting pitchers via free agency and/or the trade market to a staff that finished 22nd in the major leagues in starter ERA (4.68) in 2023. He also must acquire starting pitching depth after Boston relied too often on openers/bullpen games last season.
Blake Snell, Jordan Montgomery, Aaron Nola, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Eduardo Rodriguez, Lucas Giolito, Sonny Gray and Michael Lorenzen are among the top pending starting pitching free agents who Breslow will need to evaluate. Two-way star Shohei Ohtani will be the top free agent on this offseason’s market but won’t pitch in 2024 after undergoing elbow surgery in September.
The evaluation process must include not only each pitcher’s stuff but also their personalities. Who can handle pitching in Boston on a big contract? Not everyone can.
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Breslow needs to determine whether Garrett Whitlock and Tanner Houck should be used as starters or relievers moving forward. He should build the starting staff with Chris Sale’s lack of durability in mind.
The Red Sox also have had great difficulty developing homegrown starting pitchers the past decade and a half. This will be Breslow’s most important long-term project.
MassLive analyzed the state of Boston’s farm system Oct. 13. Chaim Bloom, who Boston fired as chief baseball officer Sept. 14, left the system in good shape. Baseball America ranked Boston fifth in its 2023 midseason organizational talent rankings. But the majority of that high-end talent consists of positional players. Most of Boston’s top pitching talent is at Double-A and below. Its top three pitching prospects — Luis Perales, Wikelman Gonzalez and Shane Drohan — all have some control issues. They need to develop better command or else they could eventually end up as relievers.
Breslow will inherit a system with several interesting young arms, including Hunter Dobbins, Yordanny Monegro, Elmer Rodriguez-Cruz, Angel Bastardo and Dalton Rogers. All these hurlers have potential but the Red Sox have had difficulty turning prospects with potential into successful big league starters.
The Athletic’s Patrick Mooney who covers the Cubs, recently wrote that Breslow in Chicago “earned broad responsibilities, overseeing a rebuild of the organization’s pitching development infrastructure, evaluating free agents and staying close to the day-to-day operations of the major-league club.”
Mooney added, “Breslow’s tenure has seen the Cubs accumulate big gains on the pitching side of the organization” and cited Justin Steele, Adbert Alzolay, Javier Assad and Jordan Wicks as some of the homegrown pitchers who developed under him.
Breslow, who pitched left-handed, played a crucial relief role when the Red Sox won the 2013 World Series, posting a 1.81 ERA in 59 ⅔ innings (61 outings) during the regular season and a 2.45 ERA (7 ⅓ innings, two earned runs) in 10 postseason appearances.
Boston’s bullpen — with Kenley Jansen returning at closer and Chris Martin returning as the setup man — is in better shape than the starting rotation. But Breslow will need to make some tweaks, including adding a couple left-handed relievers. Brennan Bernardino (3.20 ERA) is the only left-handed reliever on Boston’s 40-man roster to finish with an ERA under 4.90.
