Boston Red Sox Doing Everything They Can to Force Craig Breslow’s Hand at Trade Deadline
The Red Sox have accomplished something that no team has done in baseball history; now the ball is in Craig Breslow's court ahead of the trade deadline.
Video Transcript
What's up everyone?
Zach Coe here for Roundtable.
Through months of mediocrity, Red Sox Chief Baseball Officer Craig Breslow was insistent in his belief that the run was right around the corner, putting the onus on the players to go out there and perform to the level that the team's models said they should be playing at.
Well, despite all the eye rolls from myself and others, it turns out that Breslow was right.
That run was right around the corner, and it has arrived, as the Red Sox are amidst their longest winning streak since twenty sixteen at eleven games, becoming the first team in the twenty-first century to go from ten or more games under five hundred to five hundred without losing a single game.
Throughout the winning streak, the Red Sox have been powered by a pitching staff that's allowed just seventeen runs in eleven games, the fewest number of runs a Red Sox staff has allowed in an eleven game stretch in the live ball era, which dates back to nineteen twenty.
Despite being powered by pitching, the offense has more than held their own, scoring the fourth most runs in baseball in that stretch, getting contributions from role players like Andrew Monasterio and Anthony Ziegler.
Still though, Ziegler and Monasterio profile much better as role players on a contending team, albeit useful role players, and the Red Sox lineup has a clear need in the power department, having hit the fewest number of home runs in baseball, which as Breslow told us over the off-season, are how a disproportionate amount of runs are scored in the playoffs.
The players responded to Breslow's calls to play better, and now the onus is on him to go out there and get them the reinforcements that they've earned ahead of the August third trade deadline.
