by Bob McCullough 6/18/24
Craig Breslow got screwed. When he first landed the landed the Red Sox GM job, he probably celebrated up and down Jersey Street. He certainly thought he'd landed a premier job, with an owner who was ready to reopen his checkbook to at least some extent.
Wrong.
Tom Werner may have described Boston's offseason as going "full-throttle," but the painful truth is that the buck stopped, literally, at John Henry's suddenly closed checkbook. Henry is now among the most diversified owners in sport, with teams in hockey, auto racing and soccer to his credit, so his focus is scattered at best.
And he's made it clear with the occasional Triple AAA lineups the Sox have fielded that he doesn't particular care that the fan base is madder than a very large and extensive hornet's nest. He wants to wring every last drop of cash from the cash cow that is Fenway Park
Enter the New Executive Pitching Prodigy
Many professionals with Breslow's pitching resume might have quit, or at least mailed it in. He was a successful career reliever with a reputation for being the consummate crafty lefty--lefties who throw hard are automatically classified as crafty, don't you know--and as an assistant GM in Chicago he rebuilt the Cub's staff by doing the impossible. In other words, creating home-grown pitching.
Now he's doing the same thing with the Red Sox as the head man. Suddenly marginal also-rans like Cooper Cutter and Criswell Crawford--oops, sorry, make that Cutter Crawford and Cooper Criswell are pitching like it's 1968 and the mound is a veritable mountain. They're not quite Bob Gibson-esque--although lefty reliever Brendan Bernardino can put in a claim with ERA currently just under 1.00--but they're no longer embarrassing Humpty Dumptys who struggle to keep their earnies under 5.00 while dreading their second turn through the opposition lineup.
Want more names? Sure, no problem. You won't recognize them, but Cam Booser, Greg Weissert, Justin Slaten and Zach Kelly are all currently reaping the performance benefits of being Breslowized.
A New Approach That Will Send You Spinning
So what's Breslow's new approach? Well, golly gee, ma, don't look now but Craig Breslow and acolyte Andrew Bailey have Sox pitchers throwing breaking balls rather than trying to throw the ball hard enough to separate their arms from their bodies.
The new names include head-spinning names like "sweepers," "slurves" and the omnipresent "cutters," but if these names sound suspiciously like "New and Improved" in the same old packaging, you're pretty close to right. Jargon aside, they're also trying to locate and dominate the strike zone, which has worked in the past for everyone from Greg Maddux to Tom Seaver.
Skeptics said that Breslow, who talks more like a management wonk than a former big leaguer, wouldn't be able to sustain this, but the results argue otherwise. We're almost at the halfway mark, and the Sox staff is dominating with a bunch of guys who could hold signing sessions at your local Dick's Sporting Goods and come up near-empty.
Assuming the Sox success continues, this shifts the onus back onto John Henry. At $3 million a year for two years, Henry is getting a genuine steal, but that short deal means Breslow will be able to soon be able to write his own salary ticket. Henry probably won't pony up, but either way it's good to be Craig Breslow, who's managed to spin an old-school approach into a workable formula for sustainable pitching, given that there's an endless supply of retread stiffs on the market just waiting to be "rehabilitated."
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