MLB Notebook: Red Sox hire Craig Breslow as Chief Baseball Officer, Yankees apparently trying to acquire Juan Soto

Their new Chief Baseball Operator will be Craig Breslow, a Yale graduate who made 576 appearances as a relief pitcher across 12 seasons in the Major Leagues.

He spent five seasons with the Red Sox and won the World Series with the team in 2013. After concluding his playing career in 2018, Breslow joined the Chicago Cubs as their Director of Strategic Initiatives for Baseball Operations, an oddly long way of saying Stats Guy, and was later promoted to Assistant General Manager.

Breslow’s first kick at running a Major League organization will see him tasked with turning around a middling version of the Red Sox, who have finished 78-84 in back-to-back seasons. Given the team’s last playoff series win came back when they won the World Series in 2018, it’s hard to imagine the Red Sox will be keen on Breslow going into a rebuild situation. The plan from ownership will likely be for him to retool the Sox to be competitive fairly quickly.

New York Yankees and San Diego Padres have reportedly had discussions about Juan Soto’s trade availability

Moving along to the second-worst team in the American League East, the Yankees are apparently looking to solve their offensive woes by trading for Juan Soto.

Andy Martino of SNY reported that the Yankees and Padres have had preliminary discussions about the star outfielder’s availability. He said that it’s the “strong expectation of rival executives” that San Diego would make Soto available in “the right deal.”

The Yankees went 82-80 in 2023 and saw a significant chunk of those losses come while Aaron Judge was out of the lineup with a foot injury. New York’s lineup was among the weakest in baseball without its captain. The next-best qualified on-base plus slugging numbers on the Yankees behind Judge at 1.019 were Gleyber Torres at .800 and DJ LeMahieu at .718.

The Padres acquired Soto from the Washington Nationals during the 2022 season and he helped the team reach the National League Championship Series in the fall. San Diego was expected to again be a contender in 2023 but the team fell flat and missed the playoffs with an 82-80 record.

That result wasn’t the fault of Soto, who put together an excellent season for the Padres at the plate. He suited up in all 162 games and slashed a .275/.410/.519 line with 35 home runs and more walks than strikeouts. The 25-year-old has one more year left of team control before he can hit free agency.