You don't want to make a living or habit out of trying to solve your problems with high-price pitching free agents because over the long run, there's so much risk involved that you really can hamstring your organization.
You're not always going to get the outcomes you feel like your talent deserves, that you feel like the big picture deserves. And what's real is how do you respond in those situations?
If you want to continue to be good and perform at a high level and be deep in all areas, you still have to hit on some undervalued players, too. You can't just go out and sign marquee free agents or trade for players when they're at the peak of their value. That's not a formula for long-term success.
I tend to solicit opinions from all those around me. I like to hear opinions and the rationale behind it from everybody in the room. Perhaps it's the result of going to law school and using the Socratic method.
Something as simple as transparency is really scalable because it quickly impacts the culture. And the culture is something everyone feels. If upper management is really transparent with everyone, that has this amplifying effect. Then you tend to attract players who operate that way, on the same wavelength, and coaches and fans.
When people you don't know say nice things about you, if you allow yourself, even subconsciously, to attach a shred of meaning to it, when the opposite happens, when people you don't know say bad things about you, you can't attach that same meaning.
If you're trying to avoid one move that you don't think is going to work out, don't then settle for a different move that maybe doesn't check all the boxes. Be true to the philosophy and understand the bigger picture. There's always another day to fight.
If multiple starting pitchers underperform at the same time, it's always going to leave you in a stretch where it's hard to play better than .500 baseball.
There's nothing I hate more than someone who speaks in the draft room with absolute conviction, but they have nothing to back it up.
There has to be active, hands-on management in concert with the manager to lead the organization and make sure that the standards that we set for the organization as a whole are being lived up to.
I don't know if I could go to another run-of-the-mill baseball department and work because it would probably feel like work. In Boston and Chicago, it doesn't feel like work. It feels like a privilege.
It took me coming to the Midwest to realize I was the jerk. People are so nice here. They're so grounded.
It's always different when a guy gets drafted and developed and comes up in his first organization and makes an impact. There's something special and timeless about it.
We want to try and transform the Red Sox into a team like the Braves or the Yankees, where you can almost count on the postseason every year.
Having a relentless lineup full of professional hitters works on so many levels. It works in terms of pure baseball reasons: if you get on base, you're going to score runs.
There's a cumulative effort within the course of a game, a series, and a season, too, where you see so many pitches and have so many at-bats that you can wear down an opponent. Once you develop that reputation as a club, year after year, players come in, and they tend to fit in with that profile.
You've just got to kind of play the hand you're dealt.
I love being in a city that's playing October baseball, where you can just feel everyone captivated by the ball club, everyone walking around tired from staying up late, prioritizing baseball above all else. It's a great phenomenon.
It's best not to think about winning or losing trades anyway, because the best ones work out for both teams. But, as a rule, if you're the team that's selling - if you're out of it, and you're trading with a team that's in it - you usually have the pick of just about their whole farm system, with a few exclusions.
We've made plenty of mistakes. But the ones that we've hit on, we've gotten lucky with some impact guys back, some best-case scenarios as far as how the guys have turned out.
