Sean McAdam: Red Sox needed bold strokes at deadline, but instead got half measures

Yahoo

5 days ago

Talk about uninspiring.
After all the speculation, all the talk, all the promises of urgency, the Red Sox came away from the 2025 deadline with a back-end starter and a reliever/swingman — both of them rentals.
That's not exactly what Red Sox fans had in mind.
In the end, the team's play of late and its playoff chances, estimated to be roughly 60 percent, weren't enough for chief baseball officer Craig Breslow to act decisively.
It's a better haul than last year, but if you're setting the bar at Danny Jansen, Lucas Sims and Luis Garcia, that's not very high one to clear.
It was supposed to be different. But in the end, the acquisition of Steven Matz and Dustin May seemed to be more of the same — more hedging, more toe-dipping. If the Red Sox are better than they were Wednesday, it's not by much.
It was reasonable to expect that this would be the year for the Red Sox to approach the deadline with more assertiveness. They spent the winter vowing that the rebuild had made sufficient enough progress to mark them as contenders, with a goal of ending a playoff drought that stretches back to 2021.
Breslow, team president Sam Kennedy and manager Alex Cora all delivered the same theme, dating back to the 2024 post-mortem: enough waiting.
So the expectations were set. This would be going to be like the 2021 deadline, when the arrival of Kyle Schwarber helped lead the Red Sox to the ALCS.
To hear Breslow tell it, they tried to replicate that assertiveness. But in a conference call with reporters Thursday night, Breslow seemed to suggest he had wanted to do more, but found that the organization's prospects weren't attractive enough to land bigger pieces.
That's an odd take, given that by almost every measure, the Red Sox still have a Top 10 farm system, even if graduating Roman Anthony and Marcelo Mayer.
'We felt like we needed to do what we could to bolster the team,' said Breslow, 'so we pursued as much as we possibly could. We pursued a number of really impact opportunities. Obviously, not all of them work out, but it wasn't from a lack of trying to be as aggressive as possible, or an unwillingness to get uncomfortable. But ultimately, it takes two teams lining up for those trades to line up.
'This wasn't about an unwillingness to include guys or anything like that. Teams have to like our players in order for that to happen. We went into this deadline feeling like, in order to accomplish what we hoped to accomplish, we couldn't take our top minor league players off the table. We couldn't go into this with untouchables and we didn't We were willing to talk about all of our guys in the name of improving the team. It just didn't work out.'
There was reason for hope late Wednesday night when Ken Rosenthal reported that the Red Sox had had discussions with the Arizona Diamondbacks about third baseman Eugenio Suarez, inarguably the best hitter available on the market.
According to Rosenthal, the Red Sox would have had Suarez play first base, filling a need.
That suggested a Red Sox team that was prepared to be all in at the deadline. Knowing how much Suarez was going to cost, the fact that the Sox were willing to play in the deep end of the pool meant they were willing to be both creative and bold.
But that, apparently, passed.
All Thursday, as quality relievers and better starting pitching rentals got flung around the game so many trading cards, the Red Sox remained strangely inactive.
In the end, it appeared as though the Sox did only the bare minimum.
That wasn't the case around the American League. The Yankees landed big-time bullpen help (David Bednar, Camilo Duval and Jake Bird), and a highly athletic infielder (Jose Caballero). The Seattle Mariners, just behind the Sox in the wild card race, added two big corner infield bats (Suarez and Josh Naylor) in the last week. The Texas Rangers, making a late-summer charge, outbid the Sox for an established starter (Kelly) and two useful bullpen arms (Phil Maton and Danny Coulombe).
For context: none of the controllable starting pitchers got dealt. MacKenzie Gore, Edward Cabrera, Sandy Alcantara, Joe Ryan and Mitch Keller all stayed put.
That suggests unreasonably high asking prices, which everyone else avoided, too. So it's hard to blame the Red Sox there.
But there were better rental options than May and better relievers than Matz. That the Red Sox settled is hardly inspiring.
Had Breslow acted with the boldness he displayed last winter, when the Red Sox traded for than extended Garrett Crochet, and signed Alex Bregman, the Red Sox would be in far better position today for the final two months of this season.
Instead, the Red Sox took small steps toward improvement when a giant leap of faith was called for.
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Read the original article on MassLive.