The Red Sox front office is fractured, according to report after Rafael Devers trade
Roughly 24 hours after the Red Sox made a shocking move and traded away Rafael Devers, a new report has framed the Boston front office as an absolute circus. Only the reporter's source didn't say circus.
Just before Craig Breslow and Sam Kennedy spoke with reporters for the first time about the stunning Devers trade (also 24 hours after the deal went down), Joon Lee of Yahoo Sports titled: Inside the 'absolute s*** show' that led to the Boston Red Sox's trade of Rafael Devers.
The optics of the Devers trade were terrible for the Red Sox. He had just hit a homer in a 2-0 win over the Yankees, as Boston completed a three-game sweep of its biggest rival. He was about to hop on the team plane for a road trip, but had to take a taxi back to Fenway Park to gather his things and head to San Fran after the team completed the deal.
The Giants took over the rest of Devers' contract -- worth over $250 million over the next eight seasons -- which lessened Boston's return. The Red Sox received no established talent for one of their best players, which had fans furious at the return package.
"The optics are staggering. On a picturesque Sunday afternoon, the Red Sox swept the Yankees. Hours later, they traded Devers. No farewell. Just silence. One staffer described the situation as 'an absolute s*** show,'" wrote Lee.
Details in the story do not paint a very pretty picture of Breslow as Boston's chief baseball officer, but it makes it clear that the current climate within the Red Sox has been festering for a while now.
"What happened Sunday — the trade, the scramble, the silence that followed — represents just the latest fracture for a franchise quietly splintering behind the scenes. The Devers saga wasn't just about positional conflict or clubhouse drama. It was a symptom of something deeper: a Red Sox organization that has lost its alignment, its patience and maybe even its identity," wrote Lee.
"The tension inside Fenway Park isn't new. It has just evolved," he added.
Lee's story tells how the Boston front office has "lost cohesion" since Breslow took over as CBO in October of 2023, but also notes how John Henry's hands-off approach has led to the mess in the front office.
No collaboration under Breslow
Lee writes that Breslow and manager Alex Cora don't see eye to eye, but that isn't anything new or surprising to anyone paying attention. Cora wants to win in the present while Breslow is building for the future. At least they appeared to be on the same page with the Devers trade.
But Breslow is reportedly boxing out other members of the front office as he focuses on doing things his way.
"Multiple sources within the organization describe a front office losing cohesion. Staffers who helped build four championship teams — veterans of the Theo Epstein, Ben Cherington, Dave Dombrowski and [Chaim] Bloom regimes — now feel shut out of the operation. The collaborative spirit that once defined Red Sox baseball operations has frayed," wrote Lee.
Breslow brought a sports consulting firm to Boston -- Sportsology -- last May to audit the organization. It led to a wave of firings and "accelerated the marginalization of some of the longest-tenured voices in the building." Lee wrote that the Boston front office has undergone a major culture shift under Breslow "to align more with Wall Street efficiency."
Breslow reportedly fired scouting supervisor Carl Moesche (who had been with the team since 2017) after a "hot mic" moment on a Zoom call:
One of the clearest signals came during an internal team Zoom meeting earlier this season. Toward the end, Carl Moesche — the Red Sox's scouting supervisor and a team employee since 2017 — thought the call had ended. It hadn't. As the meeting wrapped, his voice cut through a quiet moment.
"Thanks, Bres, you f***ing stiff," Moesche said, according to two team sources.
The words landed like a grenade, and Breslow fired Moesche.
Breslow was asked about the Moesche firing , but sidestepped the question. He did give a long answer when asked about the lack of cohesion and changes made in the front office.
"That is absolutely not the direction we are trying to head in," said Breslow. "Over the last year and a half since I got here, I have spent a lot of time trying to understand our operation, our people, and the way we are set up. We have grown significantly in size over the last several years and I think in some ways, it detached some of our people from what was happening on the field. Anchoring all the work we do to what is happening on the field and the wins and losses of the team is something that is critically important to me.
"My job is to strike the right balance of people who have been here a long time and have contributed meaningfully to the four World Series championship teams under this ownership group, and also balancing that with where we are and understanding I am here because the results on the field have not been good enough for the last several years," he continued.
"To continue to do exactly what we had done in the way we had done it, I think it would be a recipe for continued disappointment and frustration from our fans and from the organization," said Breslow. "It required some difficult choices and change, but never a deliberate decision to insulate or push people away, but rather a very intentional effort to preserve all the things that make the Red Sox great and improve the things that needed to be improved on."
Where's John Henry?
A problem outlined by Lee is the "increasingly hands-off" approach of principal owner John Henry. He writes that Henry has delegated day-to-day operations with the Red Sox to team president Sam Kennedy, and there's a detachment with the baseball team with Henry's massive Fenway Sports Group portfolio.
"Case in point: Just days before the Devers trade, FSG made headlines in England by spending a record £116 million ($157.7 million) on German star Florian Wirtz at Liverpool. Meanwhile, in Boston, they were preparing to offload their franchise star," wrote Lee.
Boston fans usually point to Liverpool when the Red Sox make cost-cutting moves, assuming there's a connection between the two franchises. But Breslow pushed back on that belief during his chat with WEEI.
"That is not just a stretch, it's just completely untrue in any of the conversations I've had with John and ownership," said Breslow. "The Red Sox are run independently of any of those other organizations. The timing here was just a matter of lining up on getting the right players back and finding the right situation that represented a trade we needed to make.
