Craig Breslow and Red Sox are Botching the 2025 Season

For reasons that are hard to decipher, the Boston Red Sox are committed to the bit of testing the patience of one of Major League Baseball's most loyal fanbases.

Through the first two months of the 2025 season, the Red Sox have struggled to launch and are now in a tailspin. They have lost five games in a row and 17 out of 27 since April 29. They are a season-high four games under .500 at 27-31.

Unsurprisingly, the club's odds of returning to the playoffs for the first time since 2021 are in a rut. FanGraphs has them at 18.2 percent, down from 55.0 percent on Opening Day.

The good news is that the Red Sox still have a trump card to play. The bad news is —and this is an indecipherable-reason situation—they refuse to play it.

In Boston's farm system is Roman Anthony, the No. 1 prospect in MLB. He couldn't look more ready for his promotion to The Show, as he's slashing .318/.450/.528 through 49 games with Triple-A Worcester. Yet there he remains, prompting one American League evaluator to bluntly summarize the situation to Chris Cotillo of MassLive.com: "Makes zero sense to me."

Teams Don't Usually Deal This Much Self-Inflicted Damage

The only guy who can explain why Anthony is not yet a big leaguer is chief baseball officer Craig Breslow. But as with most things concerning his decision-making lately, what he had to say recalls Sideshow Bob endlessly stepping on rakes.

Here's what Breslow, now in his second season in charge of Boston's front office, told Jeff Passan of ESPN:

""It's really difficult to predict that someone is going to be successful out of the gate. You're making these long-term, probabilistic bets that guys who perform the way Kristian [Campbell] and Marcelo [Mayer] and Roman have tend to be productive big leaguers. But does that happen in Week 1, Month 1, Season 1? You don't know. You try to round out their development as well as possible. It's really important that communication between our major league staff and player-development group is seamless so we know exactly what their training, game-planning and routines look like so we can control as many of those variables as possible knowing what we can't control.""

If Breslow had said this in March, it would have been perfectly reasonable. It is important to be conservative with prospects, and especially so with ones who carry as much promise as Anthony.

Right now, though, all this is rich.

Breslow aggressively added Campbell to the Opening Day roster even after he struggled in spring training, and there was no hesitation to call on Mayer as soon as Alex Bregman injured his quadriceps.

Breslow is clearly patient only to a point, so it's hard to square Anthony languishing at Triple-A with what manager Alex Cora and the big club are going through.

The Red Sox's offense has gone glacially cold, scoring only 10 runs in its last five games. The problems are many, but one that Anthony could solve is the .631 OPS the club is getting from the outfield spot occupied by Ceddanne Rafaela.

To keep holding Anthony back comes off as a deliberate refusal to read the room on Breslow's part. Which perhaps shouldn't come as a surprise, as the whole organization has been stricken by some kind of stubborn cluelessness.

Since nobody has time to read what would be a tome-length recap, here's a checklist of the Red Sox's greatest mishits of 2025:

• Ticked off Rafael Devers by asking him to move off third base
• Ticked off Devers again, this time by asking him to play first base
• Upset Garrett Crochet with a quick hook
• Upset Brayan Bello with the same quick hook
• Undercut Walker Buehler being a bad you-know-what
• Keep throwing new challenges at Campbell amid a terrible slump

All of this constitutes an unforgivable failure to communicate, and the fault emanates from the top down. Breslow built a strong roster, but the resulting "team" is all brick and no mortar.

There Is Hope for the Red Sox...Barely

The saving grace here is that the Red Sox's losing ways probably aren't sustainable.

They have a positive run differential at plus-12, which points to an expected record of 30-28. They could be doing even better than that if they weren't 6-15 in one-run games and leading MLB with 14 blown saves.

Thus, there is a sense that they have already encountered a whole season's worth of bad luck. And even as this has happened, the American League hasn't left them in the dust. The New York Yankees (35-20) will be hard to catch for the AL East lead, but only 4.5 games separate the Red Sox from the AL's third wild-card spot.

At the least, the Red Sox should be eyeing a second-half run fueled by injury reinforcements. Triston Casas won't be back until 2026, yet Bregman and pitchers Tanner Houck and Kutter Crawford could be back before the July 31 trade deadline.

Still, Breslow must not wait to start reshaping the roster into a more coherent unit. This goes beyond finally calling on Anthony and cleaning up the organization's wonky communication, and indeed must begin with addition by subtraction.

With his already disappointing time in Boston having spiraled to replacement-level work at shortstop, Trevor Story should be on his way out. In the best-case scenario, the Red Sox would move on by either shopping or eating the remainder of his six-year, $140 million contract.

It otherwise isn't too soon for Breslow to scan the market for infield upgrades. In Ryan Mountcastle and Ryan O'Hearn, the equally disappointing Baltimore Orioles have two potential replacements for Casas at first base. Breslow should also call the Colorado Rockies about Ryan McMahon, an ace third baseman with experience at first.

The goal at this point is not 95-plus wins. That ship has sailed. But as the Arizona Diamondbacks and Philadelphia Phillies can vouch, even 80-something wins can get you to the World Series if your roster gets good enough care put into it.

A Contender, If You Can Keep It

In the event that nothing comes of this season, the hope going out of this year must be that the 2026 Red Sox can be to the 2025 Red Sox what the 2013 Red Sox were to the 2012 Red Sox.

The 2012 season was one of the great disasters in franchise history, consisting of 93 losses and ugly energy from start to finish. But that team had a solid core, and all it took to turn it into a World Series winner in 2013 was a few cuts, a new manager and a handful of new role players. It wasn't a rebuild, but a retool with a vibe shift.

The Red Sox of today have similar potential because of their core. Devers, Crochet, Jarren Duran and the ascendant Wilyer Abreu are 20-somethings who are already stars. The trio of Campbell, Mayer and Anthony should be headed that way as well.

Unfortunately, it's not as clear how the Red Sox are going to pull off the vibe shift they'll need if they can't salvage 2025.

There is palpable anger at Breslow and Cora on social media, but it's hard to imagine either ending up on owner John Henry's chopping block. The latter is on a pricey extension through 2027, and it would be stunning if the organization admitted defeat on the former just two years after hiring him.

One thing Boston could do this winter is pursue what would perhaps be a mutual parting of ways with Devers.

The relationship between him and the club feels broken, yet you have to hand it to him for keeping his value up with a .932 OPS and 12 homers. Especially if a team was willing to play him at third base, the Red Sox could conceivably find a taker for the 28-year-old and the $254.5 million he will be owed through 2033.

Even then, though, Breslow, Cora and the rest of the Red Sox leadership wouldn't be able to simply wash their hands of 2025. There would need to be some kind of mea culpa and a commitment to a cultural overhaul, with a tacit or even explicit admission that the grand plan for a return to contention was incomplete.

The game is baseball, not fantasy baseball. By now, you'd hope the Red Sox have already learned there's a difference.

Stats courtesy of Baseball Reference, FanGraphs and Baseball Savant.