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13 years after originally drafting him, the Boston Red Sox and Alex Bregman will finally have a chance to work together. Bregman decided to honor his commitment to play baseball at LSU.
When the Red Sox first drafted Bregman, team scout Fred Petersen hilariously mispronounced Bregman's name on a conference call.
“Part of the shtick was that I would do this AM-FM radio voice,” Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic wrote. “Petersen recalled. “Ami (Sawdaye) was down the hall and he literally flew into the room, screaming, ‘You ass—-! You can’t do that! You’re embarrassing the club!” And I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’ He pointed at the card. ‘Oh, it’s Bregman. My bad.’”
Former Red Sox amateur scouting director Amiel Sawdaye, now an assistant general manager of the Arizona Diamondbacks, jokingly accused Petersen of blowing the chances of Bregman signing with Boston.
“Ami said — and I don’t know if this is true or not — that when he called (Bregman) to congratulate him on being a Red Sox selection, that Alex was all pissed off. ‘I can’t believe guys would mispronounce my name. It’s bush league. I have no respect for the Red Sox.” Petersen said via Rosenthal. He relays that to me and of course I’m feeling like a real jerk.
“I just misread the card.”
Bregman had the Red Sox impressed, particularly scout Jim Robinson.
“Jimmy calls me. He’s like, ‘Wait, we can sign this guy?’” Sawdaye said via Rosenthal. “And I said, ‘I don’t know if we can sign him. We can try. We don’t have much money left.’ If this was 2011 when there was no pool, we would have signed him easy. I still remember him telling me: ‘This guy is the best shortstop in the class.’”
The Red Sox and Bregman will look to restore the team to its winning ways.
Alex Bregman wants to win in Boston
The Boston Red Sox are looking to return to their winning ways and they are hoping that bringing in Alex Bregman via free agency will help them accomplish that.
“I'm a winning player. This is a winning organization,” Bregman said at his introductory press conference, via ESPN. “Those players are winning players. We have winning coaches here. I plan on winning here after talking with some of the guys over the last two days. I can see that there's something special here.”
The Red Sox have accomplished a lot this offseason. The team's chief baseball officer Craig Breslow is pleased with the way this offseason has gone, setting the Red Sox up for success.
“We entered the offseason with a pretty clearly defined punch list of things that we were hoping to achieve,” Breslow said. “We talked about adding to the top of our rotation.
“We talked about rebuilding our whole pen, improving our infield defense and adding a right-handed bat to balance out our lineup. And as the offseason progressed, it just became clearer and clearer that Alex was the perfect fit for what we were trying to accomplish.”