Craig Breslow, Boston’s new chief baseball officer, has yet to make a big trade or free-agent signing to improve a team that finished last in the AL East this past season. Charles Krupa/Associated Press
Shohei Ohtani broke the bank. His stunning $700 million contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers made him the highest-paid player in the history of baseball and set the market for the offseason.
Not that anyone else is going to come close to that kind of deal.
The rest of baseball awoke to a new reality Sunday morning. Ohtani blew expectations out of the water, and left the top remaining free agents looking for their piece of the pie.
Teams like the Toronto Blue Jays, closely linked to an Ohtani deal, now have to pivot to Plan B and explain to their fans why that plan is good enough.
Other teams, like the Boston Red Sox, can look to get back to work with the logjam lifted. While Boston was rumored to be in the hunt for Ohtani early this offseason, a record-setting deal for someone who can’t pitch in 2024 never really made a lot of sense for the Red Sox.
Boston entered the winter needing pitching. That hasn’t changed, even though new baseball boss Craig Breslow has been quietly making moves to add pitching depth.
He traded infielder Luis Urias for a pitcher, and dealt outfielder Alex Verdugo for three more. He acquired a Rule 5 pitcher via another trade.
It all adds up to bullpen depth. The Red Sox now have Isaiah Campbell (a second-round pick in 2019 who posted a 2.83 ERA in his first season of major league action), Greg Weissert (a 28-year old with a career 2.90 ERA in the minors), and Justin Slaten (a 26-year old who posted a 2.87 minor-league ERA last year) to fight for spots on the big-league roster.
Breslow then used some of that depth to acquire Tyler O’Neill, a two-time Gold Glove winner who has battled injuries over the past two seasons after a 2021 season in which he hit .286 with a .352 on-base percentage with 34 home runs for the St. Louis Cardinals.
The moves make sense. The Red Sox were too left-handed in the outfield, and O’Neill has a lot of potential as a right-handed slugger at Fenway — if he can stay healthy, which he hasn’t done since 2021.
O’Neill has one year remaining before free agency, the same as Verdugo. The Red Sox saved some $4 million by trading Verdugo and then acquiring O’Neill. Not that anyone cares about the team saving money. Quite the opposite. Red Sox fans want John Henry and the ownership group to spend lavishly and jump into the deep end of the free-agent pitching pool.
We’ve been told throughout the offseason that payroll will not limit the Red Sox in their pursuit to improve the roster. The minor moves should pave the way for the larger deals to come.
Most of the top free-agent pitching talent is still available. Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Jordan Montgomery, Blake Snell and others are the type of aces who can turn a rotation around quickly.
In addition to freeing up payroll to land a big arm, Breslow could try to pry a starting pitcher from another team via trade. He has talked about being bold, and with the winter meetings over, the time for him to be bold is now.
“(We must) identify the players we think can help us and act with conviction to try and acquire them,” Breslow told me last week in Nashville. “You need to be confident in your valuations, your evaluations, and you have to be willing to act with imperfect information.”
There are no perfect deals in baseballs. Trading away players may come back to haunt you. So can overextending yourself financially in a long-term megadeal.
Yet the Red Sox brought Breslow in to change the direction of the franchise. The recent past has been a disaster. Small moves made at the margins of the roster won’t be enough. Breslow will have to hope his information is as close to perfect as possible, and pull the trigger on deals that may hurt … but may also transform his franchise.
He’s laid the groundwork. He’s put his franchise in a position to make the big moves we’ve been waiting for. Now it’s time to act.
Tom Caron is a studio host for the Red Sox broadcast on NESN.
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