The Red Sox say replacing Craig Breslow is ‘not even on the table,’ but should that be the case, and other thoughts

Picked-up pieces while debating whether to watch Haiti-Scotland World Cup or Knicks-Spurs Game 5 Saturday night . . .

⋅ Hall of Fame manager Earl Weaver rarely held “team meetings” when the Orioles were struggling.

“Why would I have a meeting if we’re going bad?” Weaver reasoned. “Suppose we have a big meeting then go out and lose the next game. What do I do then?”

This is where the Red Sox find themselves as they lurch into the middle third of their sorry season. Fenway Sports Group and Craig Breslow nuked face-of-the-franchise manager Alex Cora and six of his coaches after merely 27 games of the 2026 season. Now that the Red Sox look even worse, it’s bad optics to fire chief baseball officer Breslow, even though it’s fairly obvious he’s a huge part of the problem.

Asked Thursday about the possibility of replacing Breslow, Red Sox president and CEO Sam Kennedy told WEEI, “It’s not even on the table.” Swell. But it should be on the table.

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Theo Epstein was Red Sox boss from 2003-11 and won two World Series. His successors, Ben Cherington, Dave Dombrowski, and Chaim Bloom, all were gone in four or fewer seasons. Dombrowski was fired 10 months after winning 119 games and the World Series. Breslow is in his third season.

I believe Breslow is safe because the Sox are only two months removed from April’s seismic shakeup and don’t want to appear as unstable as they obviously are. Ownership hitched its wagon to Breslow when Cora and Co. were fired, and now they have nowhere to turn.

“They cannot fire Craig,” one of the “Cora Seven” told me Thursday. “Because if they fire him, why did they fire us?”

Fair question.

It’s become painfully clear that the Sox are paralyzed by data and Breslow is the leader of the “expected outcomes” band. (Did you know that Mickey Gasper would have hit a couple of homers if he hadn’t been playing in the Trop the other night?) Breslow has assembled a front office and clubhouse staff of folks who think they can measure and quantify everything but have no feel for what it’s like to be a major league player.

Breslow has offered little to earn the enormous trust he’s getting from the top. His player assessments — particularly evaluations of Red Sox players — have been horrendous. Has any team in the last three years made two worse deals than Chris Sale for Vaughn Grissom and Kyle Harrison for Caleb Durbin? Oh, and can you imagine having zero to show for the services of Rafael Devers and Alex Bregman?

The hideous lineup the Sox roll out every night is on Craig Breslow. Imagine Gasper (no homers, a .338 slugging percentage) batting fifth, Durbin (.204) sixth, followed by the likes of Isiah Kiner-Falefa and Andruw Monasterio?

“I can’t believe they are content going with so many [Triple-A] players — utility infielders — at the bottom of the lineup,“ a rival evaluator told the Globe’s Alex Speier Wednesday. Another said, “ . . . Role players who are being overexposed.”

Breslow is a brilliant and agreeable guy. He helped fix the Cubs’ minor league pitching department and has made Boston’s pitching better. He was atop the Sox’ baseball ops masthead when they won 89 games and made the playoffs last season. All that said, it’s hard to believe he played 12 years in the majors. He has little feel for what matters in a big league clubhouse, worships at the altar of analytics, and seems to think Driveline guys have all the answers. His is a baseball ops department that tells Jim Rice not to bother hitting prospects.

Knowing all this, the Sox are going to trust Breslow to make deals for valuable assets such as Aroldis Chapman and Sonny Gray?

Really? Does this make sense to anybody?

⋅ Quiz: 1. The NHL once had the Atlanta Thrashers, Colorado Rockies, Hartford Whalers, Minnesota North Stars, and Quebec Nordiques. All five relocated. Who are they today?; 2. Name the last 20-game winner for each American League East team (answers below).

⋅ Eli Manning and Derek Jeter sat next to one another at Game 3 of the NBA Finals Monday. It would be impossible to quantify how much pain those two delivered to Boston sports fans.

⋅ This might be the greatest NBA Finals of all time. New York is seeking its first men’s major team sports championship since the Giants beat the Patriots in Super Bowl XLVI in Indianapolis in 2012. The Knicks haven’t won an NBA crown since 1973. The winner of this year’s Finals will be the league’s eighth champion in the last eight years. The 2016-17 and 2017-18 Warriors are the NBA’s last repeat winners.

⋅ The Celtics need more players like Knicks OG Anunoby and Josh Hart. In Game 1 of the Finals, Hart registered 15 rebounds, 6 assists, 4 steals, and a block in 27 minutes. He was plus-22 for the night.

⋅ Rick Brunson, father of Knicks star Jalen Brunson, played high school ball in Salem, went on to play for Temple, then had a nine-year career with eight teams as an NBA bench player. He’s an assistant coach with the Knicks in 2026, and was on New York’s roster in 1999, when they lost to the Spurs in the Finals. Brunson played only 10 seconds in that series.

⋅ Amplifying the obvious notion that big-time college football is a complete farce, we have a Lubbock County (Texas) court ruling that Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby can return to the gridiron even after telling the NCAA he placed thousands of bets during his athletic career, including at least 40 on Indiana football while he was a redshirt freshman for the Hoosiers. The NCAA — routinely pounded by court rulings — is appealing. Wonder what the late Pete Rose would think.

⋅ Yankees righthander Cam Schlittler is in the conversation for AL Cy Young. A Walpole/Northeastern University guy, Schlittler last weekend told the New York Post, “The Red Sox don’t draft out of New England, that’s just not their thing . . . that’s just not what they do.”

This is not totally fair, of course. Schlittler was passed over by every team until the seventh round in 2022. Ditto for Yankees slugger Ben Rice (Cohasset, Dartmouth College) who wasn’t picked until the 12th round in 2021. And Bloom was in charge of the Sox’ draft in those seasons, not Breslow.

⋅ How many of you knew that Schlittler was named after Bruins legend Cam Neely?

⋅ WooSox fans who saw Yankees prospect Spencer Jones the last couple of years were not surprised when the 6-foot-7-inch rookie launched his first big league homer, a 443-foot blast in Cleveland Tuesday.

⋅ Not a fan of Willson Contreras’s temper tantrum in New York last Friday night. The combustible Red Sox first baseman was slapped with an error he didn’t deserve when Monasterio bumped into him as he was attempting to catch a foul pop off the bat of Ben Rice, who eventually struck out. No harm, no foul. But Contreras angrily tossed a water cooler and upended a bunch of other stuff after he got back to the dugout. Bush move, showing up your teammate in that situation.

⋅ Garrett Crochet has yet to pitch a game in the Chad Tracy era.

⋅ Chase Nixon, son of Trot and Kathryn Nixon, is a 24-year-old outfielder with the High Point Rockers of the Atlantic League. Young Nixon was born in Boston on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, and his father missed the birth because the Red Sox had flown from New York to Tampa after being rained out at Yankee Stadium Monday night. Kathryn Nixon went into labor back in Boston after the Sox settled into their Florida hotel. Nixon arranged to fly back to the Hub early Tuesday, but his commercial aircraft was forced to land in Norfolk, Va., when all flights were grounded after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Nixon wound up driving 19 hours to see his wife and newborn son in Boston the next day.

⋅ Orioles manager Craig Albernaz is Somerset’s latest gift to the big leagues. Albernaz was born in Fall River and played high school ball in Somerset, same as the late Jerry Remy and former Twins world champion shortstop Greg Gagne.

⋅ Bay Area athlete Catherine Breed is planning to swim the entire length of the California coastline starting in July. She expects the 900-mile swim will take her between 80 and 126 days.

⋅ The Cape League starts this weekend, which makes it a good time to pick up “Cape Cod Baseball League: From College Stars to Big League Futures,” edited by Boston baseball author Bill Nowlin and Mike Richard, historian of the Cape Cod Baseball League. With a foreword by Peter Gammons, the book covers over 100 years of league history, listing more than 1,800 former Cape League players who made it to the majors. To buy the book, contact Richard at [email protected].

⋅ Patriots Super Bowl champion Matthew Slater invites you to the Louis D. Brown Institute’s Champions for Peace fund-raiser at Willowbend in Mashpee June 25. WBZ’s Steve Burton will serve as emcee. For tickets and information, contact ldbpeaceinstitute.org.

⋅ The Massachusetts State Open golf tournament was held this past week at Oyster Harbors in Osterville. It’s the 100th anniversary of a club played by Bobby Jones, Francis Ouimet, Gene Sarazen, Walter Hagen, and Horton Smith (winner of the first Masters). Oyster Harbors hosted the Mass. Open seven times between 1932-42.

⋅ Newton’s June Ferestien will be inducted into the USTA (New England) Hall of Fame at the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, R.I., Sunday.

⋅ A friend who loathes the pickleball craze says, “Pickleball doesn’t need to exist. It’s like the iPad mini — slightly bigger than an iPhone and slightly smaller than an iPad. Pickleball is like big Ping-Pong, small tennis.“

⋅ Happy birthday to the everybody’s favorite reporter, WBZ’s legendary Jonny Miller.

⋅ It’s not easy to keep pace with some of the brilliant, often hilarious folks who comment below the online version of this column. This past week, a reader commenting on my takedown of the World Cup in Foxborough, wrote, “The closest I’ve come to being emotional about soccer was when Tom Hanks lost Wilson. Total bummer!” Eleven minutes later, another reader correctly noted, “Wilson was a volleyball.” Gold, Jerry!

⋅ Quiz answers: 1. Thrashers: Winnipeg Jets; Rockies: New Jersey Devils; Whalers: Carolina Hurricanes; North Stars: Dallas Stars; Nordiques: Colorado Avalanche. 2. Blue Jays: J.A. Happ (2016); Orioles: Mike Boddicker (1984); Rays: Blake Snell (2018); Red Sox: Rick Porcello (2016); Yankees: CC Sabathia (2010).