00:00It was an interesting morning because Craig Breslow did his semi-weekly appearance.
00:05Is that every two weeks that he's on?
00:06They're on every—the front office report is every week he rotates with Sam Kennedy.
00:09Okay.
00:09So Craig Breslow was on this morning, and the one thing that was kind of funny is that, you know,
00:14Greg Hill right now—
00:14I think he's in Hull doing his road show.
00:16Yeah.
00:17And when they introduced Craig Breslow, you could hear the crowd.
00:21It's like, woo!
00:22And this one guy goes, do your job!
00:24Do something!
00:25You can hear it.
00:26And you know Breslow's, like, hearing every single thing because you can hear it on the radio.
00:31So he obviously knows that he wasn't very well-liked by the crowd that was there.
00:35It was tough to listen to.
00:37It really was because it's essentially a guy just—and they asked him good questions, but all the questions are, why
00:43are you incompetent?
00:44Why are you bad at your job?
00:45And he had to kind of sit there and go, yeah, we need to be better.
00:48Yeah, we need to do this.
00:49We need to do that.
00:50And it's like now, ever since a couple of weeks ago where Sam Kennedy just decided that's going to be
00:55how we're going to handle this.
00:57And it's not—and matter of fact, it's probably the right way to do it, is just to take accountability and
01:01say, yeah, we're awful and we need to get better, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
01:04But this is the first question that—I mean, this one is—I don't know how you answer this, but Craig Breslow
01:12tried.
01:12And the question was, how do you turn this thing around?
01:15And yeah, here's what Breslow said.
01:16In order for the ship to be righted, you really have to win a whole bunch of baseball games here.
01:22Are you honestly believing that this team can do that at this point?
01:27Yes, and you're exactly right.
01:29We have to win a lot of baseball games, and we don't have a ton of time to do it.
01:33But I believe that we're capable of doing it.
01:35It's going to require more consistent play on the field.
01:39But I see no reason that with the pitching that we have, with the consistency of the starting pitching, with
01:47the strength of the back end of the bullpen,
01:49that we can't put ourselves in a position where we do win those games, but we've got to go out
01:54and do it.
01:54That's the reality of, you know, approaching July, being in last place in the division, not having won as many
02:01games as we thought we were going to heading into this point.
02:05I don't even know what to say.
02:07It's just—what else is he going to say?
02:09Yeah.
02:09Well, first of all, I love the guy saying, do something!
02:15It's not just booing.
02:17It's like, do something.
02:18Okay.
02:19All right.
02:20I would say this, is that they have not won more than three games in a row all year.
02:25They've only won three games in a row twice.
02:28And that was in early May.
02:29So, yes, we understand.
02:32You pitch well.
02:33You have good pitchers.
02:35You have playoff-level pitching.
02:37This is the biggest difference since Alex Cora left, that their pitching is significantly better than it was the first
02:43three weeks of the season.
02:44And by the way, eighth straight quality starts, most since 2017.
02:48Fantastic.
02:49Great.
02:50I mean, in this—but here it is.
02:52It's a results business.
02:53It's wins and losses.
02:54And later in the interview, it's also telling to me about—and I can't remember if this was the Wiggy give
03:00-yourself-a-grade question, which, by the way, no way the Patriots said give-yourself-a-grade.
03:06Like, they were—did they—you think that everybody—
03:08At the midpoint, they all said that.
03:10They all said that.
03:10Everybody had the route.
03:11And Breslow was smart, by the way, not to say, hey, I'm an FD or whatever it is.
03:16Right, right.
03:17Because we immediately do quote cards of that.
03:19But I think that—I think that when he was asked about what—he's like, I was—I'm doing what I was brought
03:26in to do.
03:26I think this is maybe the—hey, have you talked to Sean Henry?
03:30And when he said, I'm doing what I was brought in to do, and he cited all pitching things.
03:36He cited pitching development, pitching program, and that's the first thing that he cited.
03:42And I know that he knows it's more than that.
03:44But this is the problem, and you keep coming back to the pitching thing.
03:48Yes, we understand this.
03:50But the problem, the reason why you are in the last place, the reason why you are in this situation
03:55isn't rocket science.
03:57It is because you do not have the middle-of-the-order bat, the consistent bats that allow you to
04:03win games,
04:04to allow you to get runners in, allow you to come back in games, allow you to win consistently at
04:08Fenway Park.
04:09That's the biggest problem.
04:11I mean, it's—again, it's not complicated.
04:13Okay, so—
04:15Okay, play that again.
04:16I talked over it.
04:17Let me hear that.
04:20Great job.
04:20That was pretty funny.
04:22All right, so if—we were talking about this off the air.
04:25Like, the one question I'd want to ask Craig Breslow, but I would love it if he had truth serum,
04:30because, I mean, I would really like to know what he would say to this,
04:33is that if you could go back to the beginning of the season, what would you have done differently?
04:37Like, what would you do differently?
04:39What do you think, if he was injected with truth serum—
04:41Not fire Alex Cora and all the coaches?
04:43Although, he wouldn't—I don't think he would say that.
04:45No.
04:45I think he—I think he—this is what we're bringing up the trade deadline now, Rich,
04:50and their philosophy and how they're approaching it.
04:53They still do believe that their roster, their players, are good enough to actually win,
05:00to actually go on a run.
05:01They believe—they—this is why Alex Cora and half the coaching staff was fired,
05:06because they said, we believe that the players we got are better than you're allowing them to be.
05:12And so, ultimately, that's going to bear itself out, and it hasn't.
05:17It just simply hasn't.
05:18But they're still digging in on this.
05:19Why are they so delusional about that?
05:21Well, because they—this is what they've dug it.
05:25You cannot say that you're not going to pivot away from it until the very last minute,
05:29because they had put all the you-know-whats on the table,
05:32because when they fire Cora and the rest of the coaching staff, it's not—this is what it was.
05:37It was—it was, we think this is the biggest problem.
05:41It is not the roster that we put together.
05:43And they can talk about it's a long season and so forth and so on,
05:46but it's not, because you have to—it's not about the season.
05:50It's about you have three, four weeks to decide whether or not you are going to take advantage of
05:57Aroldis Chapman, Sonny Gray, maybe Wilson Contreras.
06:01That's your deadline.
06:02That's what you have to figure out if you can actually go on a run before that.
06:05You know what's wild?
06:06What's really confusing the situation, and probably Breslow, are the standings,
06:09because they are—
06:11Oh, absolutely.
06:12Three games behind Houston for the wild card in the loss column.
06:15They have a 10% chance of making the playoffs.
06:17As horrible as this season has been, I don't know how it's possible, but there it is.
06:21Yeah, it's just—I—how many teams are ahead of them, though, in the wild card?
06:26Probably like eight.
06:26Yeah, it's like eight teams are ahead of them, you know?
06:28Guys, like, we can—we can play that game, because Houston was, like, with them, you know,
06:33a few weeks ago, and now they're a playoff team.
06:35We can play that game, but you're hitting your head against the wall.
06:39It's a definition of insanity, because you have—you're—you're—whatever.
06:43We're three months in the season.
06:44Yeah.
06:45And you have not won four games in a row, and you've only won three games in a row twice.
06:50Yeah, it's crazy.
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