As We Learn More About the 'Shitshow' That is the Red Sox, Craig Breslow Gives the Worst Answer Ever for Why He Got Nothing for Rafael Devers

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Red Sox fans fall into three categories right now. You're either frustrated with watching a team with the third highest ticket prices in MLB (behind only the two teams who won pennants last season) continually dumping their best players like it's a tradition. Or you're in a small minority who just love the game so much and are satisfied with four championships in 14 years that you're fine with mediocrity as a business strategy. Or, you're simply checked out, mentally and emotionally, and stopped caring about five salary dumps ago. 

It's those last people management needs to worry about. The one unpardonable sin in any form of mass entertainment is indifference. And this ownership has sewn the seeds of apathy like a crop to be harvested and exported. And that harvest of disinterest has been more bountiful than any of us could've possibly imagined 25 years ago when this team was the absolute center of Masshole culture. You reap what you sew.

And so for everyone who's frustrated or inventing new fucks to not give what's going in the walls of Fenway, this is where things are about to get fun. It was only a matter of time before the Rafael Devers salary dump would lead to anonymous insider reports about the chaos behind the scenes. And that time is now:

Source - The deal … wasn’t the result of a trade demand or a front office trying to shed salary. It was the culmination of eroded trust, fraying relationships and a deeper breakdown inside one of baseball’s most visible franchises.

The Red Sox have spent years telling fans that they’re building something sustainable. But when pressure mounts — whether over money, development or identity — the foundation keeps cracking. The Devers trade was not a fluke but a rupture.

Across Boston, the mood is unmistakable. Fans who were told to buy into a long-term plan are watching the team punt on another star they were told would be part of it. It’s impossible not to feel echoes of Mookie Betts — another homegrown star, dealt away during his prime, for reasons that were more financial and philosophical than baseball. The details are different, but the message feels familiar: When things get uncomfortable, the Red Sox flinch. …

We then get background on the signing of Alex Bregman and Devers subsequent unhappiness. And his unwillingness to move to first base. It continues:

The relationship had eroded past the point of repair.

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. …

Cora wasn’t fully on board with how the front office wanted to manage the roster and player development. This season, Cora has managed like someone who knows his legacy is on the line, leaning into experience over upside, even when it conflicts with the long-term plan. …

Meanwhile, Breslow has grown increasingly insulated. Multiple sources within the organization describe a front office losing cohesion. …

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 fing stiff,” Moesche said, according to two team sources.

The words landed like a grenade, and Breslow fired Moesche. …

Ownership, meanwhile, has grown increasingly hands-off. … 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.

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.”

Forgive the long excerpt, but even with that, I cut out a ton.

I'm not about to forgive Devers for being a diva in all this. Not by a damned sight. But I've mentioned before in other contexts that when you have oversized talent, you get to be high maintenance, in any walk of life. And when this franchise was focused on winning, they learned to tolerate some pretty intolerable behavior from the likes of Manny Ramirez, just to name one example. You knew he'd fake a hamstring pull over a weekend in August, but he'd have 100 RBIs by the time he did, so the organization would tell Terry Francona to figure it out. And he was making $20 million at the time, which was a ridiculous sum in those days. No one was demanding Theo Epstein flip him for some middle relievers. Because the whole organization was obsessed with the idea of winning World Series. Now it exists to help get Florian Wirtz into Liverpool kit for the pleasure of people an ocean away. 

And for his part, the "increasingly isolated" Craig Breslow has only added more shit to the shitshow with this explanation for the meager return on his Devers investment:

Well OK, then. There it is. In black and white. Clear as crystal. It's not the best deal they could get, because the best deal they could get may not necessarily be good enough to trade Devers. Got it? Good. Now somebody please explain it to me. 

All I can takeaway from this is that Carl Moesche spoke for all of us when he said, “Thanks, Bres, you fucking stiff." But Breslow isn't the puppet master here; he's the puppet. His strings are being held by an ownership group that's basically become absentee since they decided World Series trophies are too expensive and started dismantling the apparatus that won four of them beginning in 2019. And apparently beer vendors cost too much as well:

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This is the sound of a once-proud franchise you loved to love swirling the drain. Now it's fast becoming that thing you love to hate. That is, assuming you even still care enough to have any emotion at all about it. It could still turn around. There's young talent coming up through the minors, allegedly. But the quickest way to give this region a reason to believe the next decade isn't going to be spent hovering around .500 like it has the last four season would be for John Henry to sell it and just focus on winning European soccer titles. It can't happen soon enough.