When Craig Breslow joined the Chicago Cubs five years ago, he could not have envisioned his path and how his contributions with the organization would play out.

His rise from director of strategic initiatives for baseball operations to assistant general manager and vice president of pitching included meeting with right-hander Jameson Taillon last offseason to recruit the free agent to sign with the Cubs.

“But nonetheless there we found ourselves,” Breslow said this week at the GM meetings in Arizona. “I am grateful for those opportunities, but mostly for kind of that trust.”

The Boston Red Sox hired Breslow, 43, last month as their chief baseball officer. Over the course of the hiring process, he constantly talked to president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer, both to loop him in professionally and take him up on his offer to provide insight and advice during the process. Breslow also spoke with Theo Epstein a handful of times given his success in the same role with the Red Sox.

“I kind of needed to affirm my own beliefs, my own philosophies, my own vision in terms of how to structure and run an organization, so this was an incredible exercise in that,” Breslow said.

Breslow spent five of his 12 big-league seasons with the Red Sox, including winning the 2013 World Series, and his roots remained, living there with his family even while working with the Cubs. He viewed the job as the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, one he didn’t want to pass up.

“If I had tried to wait until I was absolutely ready to dive in, it may not be there,” Breslow said. “As I’ve gone through the process, I feel both humbled by the expanse of the job but also reassured in that I am ready.”

During Breslow’s time with the Cubs in leading changes to their pitching infrastructure, he witnessed their depth and quality improve, two areas they were committed to strengthening.

“Did we did we get it perfect?” he said. “No, but we set a clear plan and steer in a clear direction and we were able to largely execute.

“I’m not sure how they’re going to replace me,” Breslow quipped. “The organization, is in great hands. … I’m excited to see how that goes from afar.”

The Cubs still are discussing how to fill Breslow’s role, Hoyer said, but they will look outside the organization and also likely promote some people.

“The truth is, honestly, Bres is probably not going to take one person to replace all of the things that he was doing,” Hoyer said, “so we’ll probably look for a multiprong approach to replace him.

“He left us in really good shape. I’m confident that the guys going forward can continue with that infrastructure and do a great job. There’s no doubt he had a big impact on all of our pitching decisions and in that regard he’s always going to be hard to replace.”

The Cubs saw important gains in homegrown arms after Breslow joined the organization in January 2019. Justin Steele’s emergence into a Cy Young Award contender along with the development and matriculation of arms with upside through their minor-league system are part of the dividends from overhauling the organization’s pitching infrastructure. After successfully harnessing ways to increase pitchers’ stuff and velocity, the Cubs must figure out how to improve command and execution system wide. Command training features a lot of uncertainty.

“I told the guys who I left behind that when they figured that out to let me know,” Breslow said, smiling. He expects the Cubs will see that area start to pay off in the next year.

The process wasn’t always smooth, especially at the onset. Although Breslow had total support from Epstein and Hoyer, it was challenging to change the culture, one that had success but hadn’t developed enough pitching. Getting everyone united and moving in the same direction can be difficult given how many people work in a front office and on a coaching staff. Breslow learned from the process and, looking back, might have approached certain things differently.

“But generally the blueprint for success is understand currently where you are, understand where you need to go and understand how you get there and have as many honest, open conversations about that as you possibly can,” Breslow said. “Because at the end of the day, if this is to work, everybody’s going to be perfectly clear on what the pathway was so trying to do anything other than be transparent and candid I don’t think is super effective.”

Hoyer commended Breslow for how he navigated the friction among personnel when it became apparent the Cubs were going to do things differently.

“With any changes, people are going to jump on board and say that’s great, and there’s people that are going to realize this probably isn’t the best place for them and it takes time and change can be hard and he was changing an infrastructure that needed to be changed,” Hoyer said. “He did a great job of that because we needed an overhaul at that point from top to bottom. Our pitching is in a much better place now because he was there.

“You’ve got to build the structures that are kind of anti-fragile and not just like if one person leaves they fall apart, and he hired a lot of really good people and those people step up and do a good job. He was very impactful in building that up.”

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In an interview with CNN this week, George Santos, the scandalous Republican representative for New York, admitted something almost as shocking as the 23 federal charges against him: It wasn’t a Republican like former President Donald Trump who got him into politics. It was a Democrat.

“AOC was my inspiration,” he said. “Most people don’t know that.”

It’s hard to know whether anything Santos says is true — he’s lied about everything from college diplomas to Wall Street jobs. But over the course of a year reporting on him for my upcoming book, The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos, I’ve discovered that his fixation on AOC is very real. It goes a long way to explaining his sudden rise, if not the unethical things he has done to achieve his fame.

The Santos-AOC story begins, like so many stories of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) obsession, with Twitter.

In 2019, as the Republican newcomer prepared to kick off his campaign, he sought notoriety through adjacency by becoming an AOC reply-guy, tagging her in more than 20 since-deleted tweets about everything from her office search to her supposedly “lux apartment.” He hashtagged “#AOCisanidiot.” He called her a “deranged psychotic woman” who had no place in Congress. It went on — and continues to this day, with Santos peppering his posts with AOC critiques.

But even as he was flaming her online, Santos seemed to admire her vibe and even her looks. And he said so publicly.

In March of 2020, when one of the hosts on the Empire State Conservatives Podcast said that AOC “looks like a donkey,” Santos pushed back: “She’s a very good-looking woman, and, you know, she takes care of herself.” Speaking generally, he suggested that if someone was going to “compliment her on her looks, I won’t go after you.”

His interest in her was complicated and went deeper than the surface, and this gets to AOC’s formative influence on Santos.

In the CNN interview this week, he said he used to think you needed to be a Kennedy, Bush or Clinton to be in politics, but that changed after Ocasio-Cortez won. On Thursday, he thanked her for a “beautiful moment” when she shook hands with kids from his district. Sometimes, he’d suggest that she essentially annoyed him into running: She was one of the people who “really threw a bug in me,” he said in a candidate forum complaining about her representation of the district where he grew up. Santos even saw a way to make money off his political neighbor. A political consulting company he co-founded charged over $100,000 to the campaign of Tina Forte, who was running hopelessly against AOC in 2022. By that time, Santos was trying for the second time to follow AOC to Congress himself.

“AOC demonstrated that you could come out of nowhere and beat the odds, get elected and become a national personality,” says Steve Israel, who used to run the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and once held the House seat Santos later won. Santos “followed that playbook.”

It’s possible that the the similar backgrounds of AOC and Santos made it easier for him to relate to and therefore imitate her. She was a fellow millennial — just a year younger than Santos — and came from a multilingual household like he did. Santos’ feelings about her looks and fashion sense are unsurprising, given his own attention to self-image. Santos has repeatedly claimed to be on Ozempic, and with his famous preppy-sweater-and-blazer combo, he clearly knows the value of a recognizable political costume — especially for someone young, inexperienced and constantly photographed. They’ve also both worked rank-and-file jobs: AOC was a bartender in Union Square; Santos worked in a Dish Network call center in a dusty corner of Queens, often hustling to scrounge up cash.

Both legislators also grew up on the outside looking in at power and status. Class consciousness was at the heart of both congressional candidates’ early political makeup: In the viral video that introduced many voters to Ocasio-Cortez in 2018, she argued that “women like me aren’t supposed to run for office” and that she wasn’t born into a “wealthy or powerful family.” Santos had the same mindset, one that only sometimes revealed itself under all his stories about Wall Street wealth and fancy degrees. In our very first conversation, in 2019, before he’d polished his political pitch, Santos told me with defiance that nothing had been handed to him in life — that he worked in private equity his entire career (a falsity), though he was “not a one percenter.” Instead, he said, “I work for the one percent.”

Of course, Santos and AOC have opposite-aisle political views on how to change economic circumstances, along with pretty much everything else. She’s not a serial liar, for one thing. (When I asked for her thoughts about Santos’ fandom, she did not respond). But ideology has often been fungible for Santos, who has flip-flopped on everything from abortion bans to Covid-19 precautions when convenient. The more constant truism in Santos’ life has been a desire for advancement and fame, from his drag-dressing days to his lies about being a finance star. His jump into politics coincided with a moment when politics became the hot place to be for a young person burning with conviction and ambition — a person like AOC.

Santos and AOC have taken divergent paths in their time on Capitol Hill. Ocasio-Cortez built a brand off her digital swagger, outsider mentality and willingness to be confrontational with the power structure, something she demonstrated during her new member orientation by joining a climate protest at Nancy Pelosi’s office. This kind of aggressive behavior was right up Santos’ alley. But in the years since, AOC has expanded her skills at the inside game, reaching beyond her progressive allies in The Squad, while Santos has leaned into confrontation. He could afford to: He is uninhibited by committee work or much chance at reelection. Unlike AOC, he has not set himself up for a long career in elected politics. While she fundraises with ease and serves as a vice-ranking member for an important committee, Santos is even more of an outcast than he was back when he used to think you had to have a famous last name to run. He is now threatened with expulsion and years in prison. With little left to lose, he is free to stay in the friendly confines of Rep. Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene’s embrace; able to lob potshots at his own party with AOC-style panache; eager to solidify his outsider brand in the time he has remaining in the spotlight.

The Ravens are tied for the best record in the AFC. They have a 1 1/2 game lead in the AFC North. Their defense, by any number of metrics, is the best in the NFL. And quarterback Lamar Jackson’s career-best 71.5% completion rate leads the league.

Unsurprisingly, coach John Harbaugh, who is fond of saying teams don’t win a championship during the regular season, is unstirred.

Asked Monday if his team has played at an “elite” level and done so against some of the best teams in the NFL, the third-longest tenured coach in the league essentially said it doesn’t matter.

“It’s really not a measuring stick against the other teams,” he said. “It’s irrelevant that way because it doesn’t matter until the end.”

Still, the Ravens (7-2) have stood out through the first half of the season, most notably on defense.

They are first in sacks (35), points allowed per game (13.8), points allowed per play (0.214), yards allowed per play (4.1), red zone defense (33.3%) and touchdowns allowed per game (1.1). Baltimore has also allowed the fewest yards per pass (4.6), is second in passing yards allowed per game (170.7) and is eighth in rushing yards allowed per game (91.9).

Many of those numbers are borne out of having success on all three levels of the defense.

Defensive tackle Justin Madbuike is tops among interior linemen and tied for ninth overall in the NFL with 7 1/2 sacks, already a career high. Inside linebacker Roquan Smith, the physical and emotional leader of the defense, is fourth in the league in tackles with 87, while his running mate Patrick Queen is 15th with 75.

In the secondary, Geno Stone has emerged as far more than a reliable fill-in with a league-leading six interceptions, while Kyle Hamilton continues to be one of the most versatile and talented safeties in the league. There have been plenty of other significant contributors, too, including veteran edge rushers Jadeveon Clowney and Kyle Van Noy along with the emerging Odafe Oweh, as well as cornerbacks Marlon Humphrey and Brandon Stephens.

“‘Beeks’ was a problem in camp [and] OTAs,” Ravens center Tyler Linderbuam, himself a budding star, said Wednesday when asked what it’s been like to go against Madubuike in practice. “He’s been a problem for us [on the] O-line for a while now. We’ve all seen the issues that he’s caused — the havoc that he’s caused in games, and we’ve gone against that in practice.”

The man behind the scheme, defensive coordinator Mike Macdonald, has also emerged over the past two seasons as one of the game’s bright young minds and a potential NFL coach.

Yet the defense continues to find ways to play with a chip on its shoulder.

“I feel like we are getting more respect, but I feel that it’s still not the respect that we want,” Queen said. “Honestly, we haven’t accomplished the things that we want to accomplish yet, so I feel like there is a lot of respect out there to still be taken.”

The same can certainly be said of the offense.

Though Jackson leads the league in completion percentage, he has more fumbles this season (10, six of them lost) than touchdown passes (nine). Baltimore is also just 20th in passing yards per game (208.7) and at times has struggled in the red zone or with dropped passes, albeit briefly in both cases.

Still, Baltimore is first in yards per game on the ground (160.3). Jackson’s 440 rushing yards also lead all quarterbacks by a wide margin, and his five rushing scores are third-most among quarterbacks. His 100.8 passer rating is his highest mark since 2019, when he was the unanimous NFL Most Valuable Player.

“It’s just [that quarterbacks coach Tee Martin] wants us to be perfect,” Jackson said. “Every morning, he’s got something [about] championship quarterbacking, and ‘I want you to be a championship quarterback.’ He always tells me, ‘I’m going to grade you harder than probably anybody else will.’”

It perhaps helps, too, that Jackson faces the league’s best defense every day in practice.

“Not trying to toot our own horn, but I believe our defense has no weakness,” he said. “Just from the defensive line, the linebackers, the secondary, how they’re flying around and disguising defenses — making it look like one coverage, but it’s something else — and how they time up their blitzes, it helps us out a lot, because when we’re playing other teams, they’re flying around and giving us their best shot.”

Baltimore’s special teams, meanwhile, have been inconsistent at times — particularly allowing a punt return for a touchdown against the Bengals in Week 2 and having a punt blocked by the Steelers for a safety in Week 5 — but have also excelled.

Kicker Justin Tucker has connected on 16 of 19 field goal attempts. Jordan Stout is averaging 48.5 yards per punt and has often flipped the field or pinned the opposition deep with 17 punts inside the 20-yard line.

But to Harbaugh, all that matters is what’s ahead, including two important games against the Cleveland Browns on Sunday and the Cincinnati Bengals four days later in prime time on “Thursday Night Football.”

“What the standings are now are not important,” he said. “It’s what the standings are after the last regular-season game that matter. Our guys really understand that.”

Week 10

Browns at Ravens

Sunday, 1 p.m.

TV: Fox

Radio: 97.9 FM, 101.5 FM, 1090 AM

Line: Ravens by 6 1/2

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