Pretzel logic from Red Sox Chief Baseball Officer Craig Breslow

Red Sox Nation is disappointed once again. Major League Baseball’s 2025 trade deadline has passed, and the promising Sox came away with nothing more than a marginal starting pitcher and a redundant relief pitcher. But what we did get was perhaps one of the best examples of pretzel logic ever uttered in sports — which, given the looming presence of the late Yogi Berra, is impressive.

Here’s what Craig Breslow said in his own defense about how aggressive he was or wasn’t during the mid-season trade frenzy:

None of the deals that didn’t end up being executed, in my opinion, came from a lack of being aggressive or an unwillingness to get uncomfortable.

As the Globe’s Dan Shaughnessy pointed out, that’s a quintuple negative. Let’s unkink your brain and unwind that statement.

“The deals that didn’t end up being executed” = our attempted deals.

“A lack of being aggressive” = timidity.

“Get uncomfortable” = trade valuable players.

“Unwillingness to” = being afraid.

So here’s what that actually means:

Timidity and fear of losing valuable players didn’t prevent us from making deals.

The truth: timidity and fear did prevent the deals

Breslow isn’t just being evasive, he’s lying.

Here’s what happens at the trade deadline:

Teams that expect to compete in the postseason trade minor leaguers or other redundant pieces in exchange for proven players that they expect to be valuable immediately.

It’s future versus present. The team that gets the proven players hopes for a short-term gain. The team that gets the minor-leaguers or redundant players expects to get more value in future years.

So if Breslow was actually being honest, here’s what he would say:

To truly compete this year, we’d have to give up players that we hope will be valuable in the future. Those young stars aren’t sure bets, but they do cost far less. So we weren’t willing to give up enough of them to get anybody that could help us right away, because we need to preserve that cost-effective value for the potential future. Apparently the other teams aren’t dumb enough to take our random castoffs in exchange for a good player now.

Or more succinctly:

We probably can’t really compete this year, so I was too timid and afraid to even try.

When you’re trying not to say something like that, what comes out is Breslow’s pretzel logic.