Theo Epstein

There are certainly times when baseball is much more than bread and circus, times when baseball resonates deeply and meaningfully with many, many people, and times when a game that is built around overcoming failure can teach us all a few important lessons.

If the seller has a player that they think is going to have a lot of value, they're aware of it, protect that value. You have to go get it. That's the way the trade market works.

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.

To win the World Series, you have to be able to do a lot of things well.

I still wake up thinking about draft choices we should have made that would have impacted the franchise for a long time, but I don't wake up thinking about one individual player move.

You can't go through life thinking about what could go wrong.

Sometimes, on the business side, it's important to sort of have something with some sizzle in an offseason. It's the baseball operations department's job to push back against that, just as it's the business side's job to sometimes advance those thoughts.

There are a lot of ways to make a positive impact on the community without necessarily being a politician.

When people do things they weren't even sure they were capable of, I think it comes back to connection. Connection with teammates. Connection with organization. Feeling like they belong in the environment. I think it's a human need - the need to feel connected.

Every opportunity to win is sacred. It's sacred to us inside the organization, and it should be sacred to the fans as well. They deserve our best efforts to do what we can to improve the club and put the club in position to succeed in any given season.

It's a natural push and pull that exists in any sports organization. When you are in a big market and then you win, and you're up against the Yankees, and ratings are what they are and attendance is what it is, no one wants to go backwards; as a business, you don't want to go backwards.

The fact that guys adjusted really quickly to the big leagues, developed really quickly, faced adversity under the brightest spotlights, played great baseball, overcame so much, overcame centuries worth of issues and won a World Series, I guess it doesn't necessarily mean we're still not just prone to the laws of nature and reality and baseball.