Craig Breslow Hires Consultant to Answer World’s Easiest Question

For every genuine tech innovation, there are thousands of half-baked ideas that fizzle out, often because “disrupting” an industry is little more than slapping a new label on old technology and calling it a breakthrough. It doesn’t have to go full Juicero to be ridiculous; you wouldn’t believe how many times Silicon Valley has, perpetually in a cloud of its own farts, reinvented the bus. When innovators enter industries that don’t need to be innovated — and in some cases, can’t be — they try anyway, spinning their wheels and running their mouths until the jig inevitably ends.

You see, the benefactor never waits forever. There’s always a smoother-talking younger professional who assures the older powers-that-be that their intuition toward cost-cutting is right. How’d they get so rich otherwise? There is a better way, they say, and I can help you find it. In the case of the Red Sox, these roles were played by John Henry and Chaim Bloom, respectively. Sure, Henry knew how to win baseball games, but he had done so the old-fashioned way, by paying for good players. What Bloom’s theory of management presupposed was: Maybe he shouldn’t?

Henry ate it up, Bloom gutted the team and, unsurprisingly, got fired for failing to deliver on his promises. He was replaced by Craig Breslow after a decent number of others turned down the job, likely because Henry still thinks his “do the wrong thing and make it work” theory holds water. That’s the other thing about these tech titans and their money men: They’re far too stubborn to admit defeat in any real way unless confessing to a judge.

I think Breslow has been markedly better than Bloom ever was, in short order. I also think if you put him under oath he’d say his major limiting factor, despite having a McKinsey-type backround like the man before him, is the cap Henry has put on the team’s spending. Perhaps to appease his boss, perhaps to put his own stamp on things and perhaps for reasons I can’t fathom until I hear them, Breslow has hired an outside group to do a full audit of the Red Sox organization, to get right down to the bottom of the least complicated issue on Earth.

On one hand, this reeks of a witch hunt, looking for redundancies in the cubicles in the absence of providing workers the tools to succeed. On the other hand, it could suggest bloat in the system, though it’s really hard to parse from the outside. At the very least, it’s good for jokes, not leastwise because the company conducting the audit is named Sportsology, and in the words of Site Manager Dan Secatore, “if I were hiring an outside consulting firm to evaluate my whole company, I would at least want someone who spent more than 10 seconds thinking of a name.”

Pointedly, the idea that the Red Sox need to be consulted on how to win games is hilarious on its merits, as they’ve been arguably the most successful baseball team of the century, as Pete Abraham posted on you-know-where:

As others have noted, this whole operation could end up being a giant nothingburger. I find it very hard to believe that there is some major processional flaw that is hindering the organization other than its conscious decision not to offer high salaries to the best players in the game. Trying to win is like riding a bike: you can only unlearn it on purpose. In both 1918 and 2020, ownership decided they’d much rather just walk, leaving the bike to rust in the bowels of Fenway.

If this audit accomplishes anything positive, which I strongly doubt, it’ll tune that bike up so it’s as good as new, ready to be ridden again. It’ll say something to the effect of what Abraham wrote above, along the lines of “While building a solid minor-league system and promoting players from within is a core tenet of competitive baseball teams, the Red Sox have additional financial resources that could be used to attract and retain the league’s most talented players and give them a lasting advantage.” Except something, somehow, way more boring than that, about 250 pages and for astronomically better pay.

If this audit accomplishes anything negative, which I only sort of doubt, it’ll be to fire some poor functionaries at the altar of professional sacrifice for Henry’s bad decisions. The leader cannot be wrong, after all; he can only be wronged. I hope, for Breslow’s sake, and especially because this seems to be his decision, that this isn’t the case. If there’s a ray of hope, it’s that Breslow could be hiring Sportsology to say the things he can’t: That the team needs better players, needs to spend money for them and needs to do it in perpetuity. Stop pedaling a bike and it falls over. Starting over, you need a little push. The only real question is: How hard will this one be?