Wednesday night, Tyler O’Neill delivered his 30th home run in the form of a walk-off Monster-clearing moonshot to win the game and the series against the Baltimore Orioles.
“You know, as much as I tell myself that it's not wise to kind of live and die with every game, last night was a good one. Last night was fun,” Craig Breslow said Thursday morning when he joined The Greg Hill Show for the Front Office Report.
The walk-off moment was so good that it could help lead to an extension for the 29-year-old outfielder.
“We'll obviously start to engage in those [contract] conversations, but I think we've all acknowledged that right-handed power plays really well at Fenway Park, and he's been a great fit,” Breslow said.
“He's been a really productive hitter when he's been able to stay on the field. I think we're seeing that right now. He's been on quite a hot streak, and he has the ability to carry this team and change games with a single swing.”
Boston found itself in a precarious position postseason-wise after the teams they trail in the Wild Card race, Kansas City and Minnesota, both pulled off wins Wednesday night. How does a young team like the Red Sox stay focused on winning each night when their playoff odds get slimmer each week?
“I think Alex [Cora], all season, has done a great job of keeping the group focused on the field and, you know, ignoring the noise, the adversity, the injuries,” Breslow said.
“I think Alex's message has been, these games matter, right? Let's try to play our best baseball, let's keep winning games and we can't control what happens around us, but, we've got a chance to make this interesting, and we're going to do that by continuing to play good baseball.”
Their poor playoff chances, currently set at 6.6% by Fangraphs, can mainly be attributed to a major second-half slide for the team. Boston holds the third-worst record in MLB since the All-Star break (21-29) behind only the White Sox and Angels.
“I think it's a fair question. It's one we need to answer,” Breslow said of the team’s recent downward trend in the second halves of seasons.
“I don't think that this is an Alex Cora thing. I think this is something that requires us to look at the composition of the roster, to look at the workloads, to make sure that I, and we, in the [front] office are bringing in enough depth that we can weather injuries, bumps and bruises, that we're still pushing development so that guys are better in the second half than they are in the first.”
When asked whether the front office should be blamed for the second-half swoon, Breslow responded, “I mean, I suppose, in some ways, the answer to that could be yes.”
“At the time, given the information that we had, we executed what, you know, what we thought was a successful deadline,” he continued.
On whether this offseason could bring about the acquisition of elite players, either from the free-agent market or otherwise, Breslow said the Red Sox have to be “open to all paths” for improvement.
“Obviously, we've still got 16 games and hopefully more left and that's where our focus is right now,” he said.
“But I think regardless, one thing we can take from 2024 is the development on the field of a core group of players that we should be building around.
“The recipe for success here for a long time has been drafting and developing homegrown talent while also supplementing that via free agency and trade, and I don't see a reason for that to change.”
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