TORONTO — The mass firing of Boston Red Sox manager Alex Cora and five of his most experienced coaches shocked the baseball world for both its timing and breadth. But to those familiar with the inner workings of Craig Breslow’s baseball operations department, the heavy-handed treatment did not come as a surprise.
Breslow, the Yale-educated chief baseball officer, carved out a 12-year career in the majors as a left-handed reliever. His playing experience, however, did not immediately translate into clubhouse feel as an executive. He irked staff with mandates that felt like micromanagement. And the many players and coaches who knew of Breslow’s disagreements with the Red Sox hitting department had long suspected that he wanted to clean house.
Some Red Sox staffers believed even last season that Breslow wanted to make wholesale changes to replace coaches he’d inherited when he took over at Fenway Park after the 2023 season, and many Red Sox players were well aware that Breslow had questioned the abilities and methods of hitting coach Pete Fatse and his lieutenants. That group in particular was perceived to have absorbed outsized blame for the failure of prospect Kristian Campbell to achieve bullish internal projections.
At one point last season, word spread that the most influential player in the clubhouse, Alex Bregman, had gone to bat for the embattled coaches.
Such tension fueled the Saturday night purge, which claimed Cora, a World Series-winning manager, franchise icon Jason Varitek and bench coach Ramón Vázquez. Breslow also axed Fatse, assistant hitting coach Dillon Lawson and major league hitting strategy coach Joe Cronin, delivering the news in person in Baltimore following the club’s offensive explosion in a 17-1 victory at Oriole Park at Camden Yards. The Red Sox were, at that point, 10-17 with 135 games remaining in the season.
Speaking from the visiting dugout in Toronto on Tuesday, Breslow said it was those remaining five months of the season that led him to act when he did — he wanted to give the team time to turn things around and live up to its potential — and denied that he came into the season with any lingering desire to fire the staff and install more handpicked coaches.
“The idea that this was some predetermined outcome is just not true,” Breslow said.
The angry reaction in the Red Sox clubhouse on Sunday suggested that Breslow’s message of faith and confidence had fallen flat.
According to multiple people who were in the Red Sox clubhouse in 2025, each granted anonymity for their candor, the disconnect between Breslow and certain members of the coaching staff was well known last season. Breslow would occasionally ask Bregman for feedback, and Bregman became a consistent advocate for Fatse, Lawson and Cronin, crediting those hitting instructors for helping him return to an All-Star level.
According to one player, one version of events that made the rounds was that Breslow was ready to dismiss some coaches until “Bregman stepped in last year and stopped the firings.” Other sources stopped short of saying Bregman saved anyone’s job last season but agreed that his outspoken advocacy for the hitting coaches was well known.
Breslow said that Bregman was “very respectful of multiple aspects of the organization.”
Still, Bregman, too, moved on, signing a five-year, $175 million contract with the Chicago Cubs this past winter after the Red Sox did not offer him a no-trade clause. They took a wait-and-see approach with the free agent and then were outbid.
In San Diego this week with his new team, Bregman declined to comment on the situation when approached by The Athletic in Petco Park’s visiting clubhouse before Monday night’s game, other than to say: “I got all the love in the world for those guys,” referring to Cora and the other dismissed Red Sox coaches.
Breslow denied that he was close to firing the coaches last season, or that he came into this season looking for an excuse to clean house.
“These decisions were driven by the performance on the field,” Breslow said. “And I’ve said it before, I take accountability for the product on the field, for the roster. I also take responsibility for trying to find solutions. And just felt like we have a ton of confidence in the team, in the players, in the guys in the clubhouse. This decision was really, really hard, but we wanted to do it at a point where we still had enough of the season ahead of us that we could be the team that we thought we could be.”
Now in his third season as chief baseball officer, Breslow began making widespread changes in his first year on the job when he brought in an outside company to audit the entire front office in 2024. The audit created consternation throughout the organization and led to firings of several long-time employees, including the scout who drafted Roman Anthony.
Breslow was more methodical in the way he reshaped the on-field coaching staff.
The Red Sox dismissed longtime pitching coach Dave Bush and third base coach Carlos Febles in the weeks before Breslow was hired in November of 2023, but Breslow fired first base coach Andy Fox, bullpen coach Kevin Walker and assistant hitting coach Luis Ortiz (who worked closely with Rafael Devers) after the 2024 season. The team announced this winter that assistant hitting coach Ben Rosenthal would not return after four seasons with the team. Rosenthal had worked especially close with outfielder Jarren Duran.
This weekend’s purge left the Red Sox with no coaches who were on the major league staff when Breslow was hired.
“He wanted to fire everybody who was here before he got here,” one source said. “That’s what he has now.”
Heads of baseball operations naturally want a coaching staff that fits their vision, but the slow transformation of the Red Sox staff came with such tension that one former staff member said he was “relieved” to have been let go. In a social media post just hours after his dismissal Cora declared himself “happy.”
“From my perspective, I spent a lot of time in the offseason with the coaches in spring training building relationships, trying to be as big a champion and advocate for what we were trying to do and what they were trying to do as possible,” Breslow said. “I was optimistic.”
At one point last year, according to people involved, Breslow asked the Red Sox coaching staff to begin documenting every pregame hitting and defensive drill done by each player, which some coaches found excessive and time consuming, further fueling a perceived lack of trust between the staff and the front office. At the start of the 2026 season, Breslow also took on some oversight of the team’s major league development process, a role that had previously been held by assistant general manager Paul Toboni, who left the club last season to run the Washington Nationals. Breslow did not replace Toboni.
Multiple people also singled out Campbell’s major league struggles as a source of Breslow’s frustration with the hitting department. Campbell was 22 and among the most highly touted prospects in baseball when — after a year and a half in the minor leagues, and only 19 games in Triple A — the Red Sox made him their Opening Day second baseman in 2025, signing him shortly thereafter to an eight-year, $60 million extension. Campbell had struggled in spring training, but internal metrics said he nonetheless would be one of the best hitters on the team.
Instead, Campbell failed to pull the ball — a weakness that had been discussed internally — and had a .664 OPS when the Red Sox optioned him back to the minor leagues in the middle of June. He hasn’t been back to the big leagues since, and there was a sense within the clubhouse that Breslow blamed Fatse for Campbell’s inability to live up to the projections.
Breslow, though, said Campbell’s struggles last season had nothing to do with his decision to fire coaches this weekend.
“I think it’s probably a stretch to connect those dots,” Breslow said. “This is the 2026 major league season. Now, when we’re evaluating players and we’re trying to figure out how we can help them reach their potential, we’re constantly questioning everything that we’re doing.”
Whatever the source of tension, multiple people involved were unequivocal about the disconnect between Breslow and Fatse.
“(The front office) didn’t believe in Pete, let’s put it that way,” one source said. “They didn’t believe in Pete. That’s the reality of it. That’s true.”
Said one player: “Breslow hated that we wouldn’t ‘train’ the way he thought was optimal on the hitting side. I don’t even know what Breslow thinks is the proper way to train hitting.”
The new Red Sox hitting coaches might offer some sense of Breslow’s guiding principle.
When he was hired, the Red Sox were deep in young position players and thin on young pitchers, and Breslow set out to reform the pitching pipeline with encouraging results in young starters like Payton Tolle and Connelly Early and the immediate big league success of outside acquisitions Garrett Crochet and Aroldis Chapman. Entering this season, every member of the Red Sox major league pitching department — pitching coach Andrew Bailey, bullpen coach Chris Holt and major league pitching strategist Devin Rose — was hired by Breslow, and all kept their jobs.
“I think it’s fair to say that, in the system on the P.D. side, there’s a bit of a skew toward pitching now,” Breslow said. “And we need to make sure we’re balancing that.”
Now, the top two Red Sox hitting coaches — John Soteropulos and freshly promoted assistant Collin Hetzler — are also Breslow hires, each having previously worked at the baseball training institution Driveline, whose founder, Kyle Boddy, was hired by Breslow as a special advisor in 2024. Soteropulos and Hetzler were initially hired by Breslow to work with minor leaguers, but each has risen to the big league staff, Soteropulos this winter and Hetzler this weekend.
“It seems like there’s kind of a stigma around Driveline and what it entails,” Breslow said. “But in my opinion, if you take a step back and think about Driveline as more of a mindset or an approach to development and training, where you’re trying to be very clear in assessing where a player is, you’re trying to identify the goals that would allow them to realize major league value, and then you set up consistent programming and training with measurable progress toward that — to me, that’s what Driveline is.”
Current manager Chad Tracy, bench coach José David Flores, third base coach Chad Epperson, and first base coach Pablo Cabrera predate Breslow in the Red Sox organization — all were minor-league coaches and managers when he was hired — but all carry interim tags with their current jobs. The only permanent members of the staff are Breslow hires.
“It’s his show,” a source said. “He’s going to run it his way.”
