2024-2025 Front Office, Staff, and Coaching Changes

As Craig Breslow heads into his second offseason at the helm of the Red Sox, he has made beefing up the club’s front office a top priority. It appears the club is close to making a step toward that end by poaching from a division rival.

The Red Sox are set to hire away Tampa Bay’s director of predictive modeling, Taylor Smith, to a high-ranking role with a focus on analytics, according to multiple league sources. Smith’s exact title is unclear but it is likely a vice president/assistant general manager role. Smith, who graduated from the University of Georgia in 2018, has been with the Rays for seven seasons. He is expected to receive a vice president title and take over responsibilities related to analytics that were previously held by assistant general manager Mike Groopman

International scouting and player development had kind of been their own departments within baseball operations for decades. That has now changed. Breslow has folded those departments into his four main baseball ops "pillars" -- Acquisitions, Development, Operations, R&D -- with international scouting now falling under acquisitions and player development now falling under development (with the reporting lines going to their player development director Brian Abraham rather than assistant GM Eddie Romero). Romero will work across departments to ease the transition, but I think some changes are unavoidable -- and as has been the case with everything the Sox have done (and everything the entire baseball industry has done) over recent years, I expect there to be more data-driven development and scouting/signings/acquisitions.