Be careful when Googling “Juan Soto” and “Boston Red Sox.” You might stumble into a rabbit hole that’ll keep you busy all weekend.
Yes, Soto and the Red Sox have met and, yes, this and that baseball insider has said Soto-to-Boston may well happen. It’s just that Red Sox fans can be excused for their wariness, and for one simple reason: They’ve been conditioned in recent years not to be wowed during the offseason.
It’s one thing that the Red Sox have not qualified for the postseason in three seasons, which is especially frustrating given a modern-day playoff format that has all kinds of transoms and unlocked backdoors that allow teams to sneak into October. But to make matters worse, the Sox of recent offseasons always seem to be “in on” every available player on the market, only to report back to their fans that, gee, they just couldn’t pull it off. Darn.
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Put another way, the Red Sox don’t surprise their fans anymore. They don’t make the shocking news that sets the market. To use the old line, they aren’t out there playing chess while the other teams are playing checkers.
By way of example, let’s jump into the Wayback Machine to November 2003, when then-Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein parlayed a Thanksgiving Day dinner into one of the most important trades in franchise history.
In Greater Boston and beyond, it’s a holiday story right up there with “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and, of course, “The Godfather.” (Yes, “The Godfather” is a holiday flick. If you know, you know.)
The date: November 27, 2003. Thanksgiving. Epstein and assistant GM Jed Hoyer, having traveled to Arizona hoping to persuade big-stage pitcher extraordinaire Curt Schilling to waive the no-trade provision in his contract that would make possible a trade to the Red Sox, found themselves being invited to stay over and have Thanksgiving dinner with the Schillings. It probably wasn’t as simple as Epstein and Hoyer waving hello followed by Schilling waiving the no-trade, but things definitely fell into place over dinner. Just one day later, the Sox and Arizona Diamondbacks came to terms on a deal.
Schilling turned right around and cut a Ford F-150 commercial in which he is shown hitching a ride to Boston so that he can, ahem, “break an 86-year-old curse.” It turned out to be truth in advertising, as the Red Sox won the 2004 World Series — with a big boost from Schilling’s 21-6 record during the regular season and his bloody-sock heroics in the postseason.
We bring up the Thanksgiving dinner not just because ’tis the season, but also to illustrate the Wild, Wild West manner in which the Red Sox did their business in those days. Epstein wasn’t just a dealmaker; he was an outside-the-box thinker who thought way, way, way outside the box, as illustrated by the fact it was he, and not Yankees general manager Brian Cashman, who showed up at the Schilling home with pumpkin pie.
The Red Sox are missing that swagger and derring-do. The franchise that sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees in the early 20th century is the same franchise that traded Mookie Betts to the Dodgers in the early 21st century. Just as it took more than 80 years for the Red Sox to win another World Series post-Bambino, dispirited Sox fans have a right to wonder how long it’ll take post-Betts.
Which brings us back to Soto. No, it won’t be enough for Craig Breslow, chief baseball officer for the Red Sox, to show up at the Soto manse for Thanksgiving. The Red Sox, Dodgers, New York Mets, Yankees and Toronto Blue Jays reportedly have made offers. The deal could be worth $700 million, which is staggering.
Signing Soto would set off a chain reaction of other moves for the Sox, likely including at least one of their young big leaguers — Triston Casas? Wilyer Abreu? Jarren Duran? — being traded. It’s likely that minor-league prospects Roman Anthony, Kyle Teel, Kristian Campbell or Marcelo Mayer are untouchable, but who knows? Breslow is running the shop now, and he’s blessed with book smarts (Yale) and the perspective that comes from being a former big-league pitcher who played for a World Series winner. It also helps that Breslow has a solid relationship with Epstein, who has returned to the Red Sox in a consulting capacity.
It’s reasonable that Epstein has pull with Red Sox owners John Henry and Tom Werner that Breslow hasn’t developed yet. It’s also possible Breslow has been playing the long game since he arrived in Boston a little over a year ago, and that he’s now poised to dramatically pull levers and press buttons over at Fenway.
Again, that’s what the Red Sox used to do. They took action. They did things. And when they did those things, it electrified a fan base always hungry for more. Not to be alarmist, but this might be a good time for the Red Sox to worry about losing a generation of fans. The Sox drew 2,659,949 fans to Fenway Park in 2024, the 11th-highest total in baseball, but from 2008 to 2012 they had a run of five straight seasons in which their annual attendance was more than 3 million.
One big, splashy signing won’t inspire a rush to the ticket office to buy up every ticket for 2025. But it would definitely be a sign that the Red Sox are back in the winning business, not just assembling teams that are passably entertaining and win just enough games to make it through the summer as kinda-sorta contenders.
Tastes change over the years. Spending habits change. And it’s no longer a given that kids with an interest in sports will follow teams the way their parents did when they were growing up.
Call me an alarmist, but if the Sox wait until crowds of 17,000 start turning out at Fenway Park, the damage might take years to fix.
It’s time for the Red Sox to surprise everybody.
(Photo of Curt Schilling pitching in Game 6 of the 2004 American League Championship Series: Al Bello / Getty Images)
