When the Boston Red Sox hired Craig Breslow as chief baseball officer and Andrew Bailey as pitching coach last fall, there was a clear indication that improving the organization's pitching infrastructure would be a top priority. Breslow had been an assistant general manager and, more importantly to this discussion, vice president of pitching for the Chicago Cubs before he was hired, while Bailey was the pitching coach for the San Francisco Giants from 2020 to 2023.
For a team like the Red Sox that has struggled on the pitching side of the equation the last few years, bringing in a pitching-oriented executive to lead the show and then putting a new person in charge of pitching at the MLB level made all the sense in the world.