Eleven runs. One point two innings. April 14th.
That’s not a rough outing. That’s a hostage situation. Garrett Crochet — the guy this whole pitching staff was supposed to be built around — walked off the mound against the Minnesota Twins having thrown the worst start of his career, and the Red Sox front office’s response was essentially: we’re good, thanks for asking.
Craig Breslow went on record this week expressing confidence in the existing roster. No urgency. No panic. Just patience.
Cool strategy, Craig.
Boston is 8-11 and sitting fourth in the AL East. They started 2-7 through their first nine games. Only 14 teams since 1903 have made the playoffs after a 2-7 start or worse. Those aren’t damning odds — they’re a math problem with a very bad answer. And Breslow is out here treating April like a preseason scrimmage.
Happy to help make history! https://t.co/r5chCUl567
— Minnesota Twins (@Twins) April 14, 2026
Now, to be fair — and this is the part that actually matters — the Pythagorean record has Boston at 9-10, which means some of this losing is close-game variance, not necessarily a team that’s getting demolished every night. Baseball has a way of smoothing out over 162 games, and one catastrophic start from Crochet doesn’t mean he’s cooked. But the “patience” framing assumes that the problems are temporary and self-correcting — and nothing in this roster construction suggests that’s true. Triston Casas is hurt again. The young infielders are scuffling. There’s no veteran bat on the bench stabilizing anything. Patience works when you have a foundation. What’s the foundation here?
Breslow spent years selling the rebuild. This was supposed to be the payoff season.
Instead, their ace just got shelled for 11 runs in fewer than two innings by a Twins lineup that isn’t exactly the ’27 Yankees.
Patience isn’t a strategy when the window is already cracking. It’s a holding pattern. And holding patterns are fine at 35,000 feet, not so great when you’re already losing altitude in the AL East in April.
Nobody’s saying fire everyone and go full panic-trade mode. But there’s a version of “trusting your guys” that is actually just hoping things improve without doing anything to make that happen. Breslow seems to be living in that version right now.
The Red Sox aren’t historically bad. They’re April bad. There’s a difference. But April bad with a banged-up Casas, a shaky rotation beyond the ace, and no urgency from the front office starts to look a lot like May bad, June bad, and then a very familiar July where Boston is 10 games out and someone from WEEI is asking whether they should sell at the deadline.
They’ve sold the rebuild long enough that patience has started to feel like a reflex. Something goes wrong, Breslow grabs the mic, talks about the process, and everyone’s supposed to nod.
One of these times the process has to actually produce something.
That time might need to be now, before “patient” becomes the kindest word people are using.