Red Sox To Overhaul Baseball Operations Department. Again.

Waaaayyy back in May, Craig Breslow asked the lazily-named consulting group, Sportsology, to conduct an audit on the baseball operations department. Well, the audit’s over and, in a move that will surprise no one who has ever met a consultant, they apparently recommended that Breslow fire a lot of people. Interestingly, this includes several longtime scouts, such as Willie Romay, who is credited with signing Triston Casas, Kutter Crawford, and Roman Anthony.

I won’t pretend to know whether any of these people were good at their jobs. The Red Sox have been mired in mediocrity for over half a decade now, which suggests that change is needed in the baseball operations department. Moreover, I’m not even sure what it really means to say that a scout “signed” a particular player in this day and age, when most of the country’s top amateur talents are meticulously tracked by every MLB organization for years before they’re even eligible for the draft. (Triston Casas was already playing international baseball tournaments for Team USA when he was 16. You probably didn’t need to be Buck O’Neil to decide that he was good.)

So perhaps it is true that the baseball operations department needed a significant overhaul. But what Red Sox fans should remember is that the significant overhaul was already supposed to have happened. And then supposed to have happened again.

Reports about the Red Sox overhauling their baseball operations department after realizing they’d fallen behind now occur as regularly as the Olympics. Back in 2017, we were told that Dave Dombrowski was shocked to see how small the Sox analytics department was when he arrived, leading to an “aggressive overhaul” and an analytics department that grew three-to-four times larger than the one Dombo inherited. “The landscape of gaining competitive advantages is more and more difficult unless you deploy resources — and the right resources,” said then-assistant general manager Brian O’Halloran. “In terms of the resources deployed toward that area, we had just fallen behind.”

Then, at the beginning of the 2023 season, we were treated to reports about the “rapid growth” of the baseball operations department spearheaded by Chaim Bloom. “Eventually we saw we’d fallen behind and we started to address that,” said Brian O’Halloran (again). “I think that accelerated with the leadership change at the end of 2019 with Chaim here and with us overseeing the department that’s been a real focus for us to continue to innovate, push, grow and add capabilities where we can get advantages.”

Innovate! Capabilities! Cool! But now, just one year later, the Red Sox are apparently forced to do it all over again.

“[T]he task that I have been handed is to ensure that I and we are doing everything possible to position ourselves not to have been successful, but to stay on the leading edge of all that represents a modern baseball operation and gives us the best chance of winning as many baseball games as possible,” said Craig Breslow about this latest overhaul. (Brian O’Halloran, who has since been promoted to GM, was apparently unavailable to comment.)

While I’d love to unpack the fact that Breslow seems to think there’s a difference between being successful and, uhh, winning as many games as possible, there’s something else that’s important to focus on here: Whereas the Dombrowski and Bloom overhauls were focused on building things up, this one appears to be focused on tearing things down. The rapid growth that occurred under Bloom in an attempt to “innovate, push, and grow” was apparently unnecessary and is now standing in the way putting the Sox on the “leading edge” of modern baseball.

But the Sox aren’t stopping at severance packages.

Yesterday, Zack Scott, who was a member of the Red Sox baseball operations department for 16 years from 2004-2020 before briefly serving as the GM of the New York Mets, reported that the Red Sox were not only letting several people go, but also asking some remaining employees to take reduced salaries, a report which was later confirmed by Alex Speier:

And this is what concerns me now. Dave Dombrowski, Chaim Bloom, and Craig Breslow are each their own man. They have dramatically different backgrounds and, perhaps, dramatically different ways of approaching their job. They are entitled to shape the organization they lead in whatever manner they deem necessary. But of the three successive baseball operations overhauls, this is the only one that seems to be prioritizing cutting costs.

Maybe it will work! Maybe the baseball operations department that was enthusiastically built up by both Dombrowski and Bloom was actually a hive of inefficiency, with entire floors of employees whose only real contributions were providing vigorous head nods during the weekly all-hands meeting. Or — maybe — the thing that the Sox realized they’d fallen behind on this time was “maximizing human capital ROI”. And, yes, if you’re tired of the corporate buzzspeak, there’s another word you can use for that.