Craig Breslow

And the second thing that stood out was this big sense of humor that people talked about.

And so we're looking forward to your personality really surfacing over the next five years.

And so we want to welcome your family to ours, to the Red Sox family.

And I can assure you that if you pitch like you have over the last six years and you make people laugh, then you will readily endear yourself to the Red Sox faithful.

So welcome.

We're incredibly excited to have you and really excited for what the next five years will bring.

Sure, I can take the first step here.

Obviously, Scott had a number of really talented free agents this year, as the Boris Corp tends to.

And so we expressed interest in a number of them, but from very early on, we felt like

as it related to free agent starting pitching ranger was the guy that we wanted to target um you know really liked what he had accomplished felt like he would be a great fit both for our park for our kind of pitching uh style and and the job that our pitching group does

And then also the way that he would slide into the rotation.

We talked about, you know, trying to create the most formidable rotation we possibly could entering, you know, potential post-season and feel like, you know, Ranger fits right in.

And as a guy, like I've talked about earlier, who has the track record of post-season success.

So, you know, in terms of conversations, you know, made sure that Scott and I stayed in touch, you know, and when there was the opportunity to get this across the line, we pushed to do so.

Sure.

Well, I think the place to start is that there was strong interest in Ranger, irrespective and independent of other decisions and other outcomes.

And we had established a foundation of that interest, a relationship with Ranger, a great Zoom call that Scott alluded to where we talked about our pitching philosophy, the things that have worked for Ranger, why we feel like they can continue to work.

And I think the

The most important thing that we did as an organization, as a baseball operation is understand that there are multiple paths to improving the team.

And I don't think there's a question anymore that the identity of our team, the strength of our team is going to be our pitching and our ability to prevent runs.