The Red Sox may go ‘full throttle’ someday.

Thursday was not that day.

While Major League Baseball was a-flurry with deals throughout the week, the trade deadline came and went quietly for Boston’s ball club, which only made two moves before the 6 p.m. cutoff:

Lefty reliever Steven Matz and righty starter Dustin May.

Both are short-term rentals headed for free agency at season’s end. Neither were top names on the long list of players expected to be wearing a new uniform this weekend.

It would have been difficult for the Red Sox to make any move bigger than June’s Rafael Devers trade, and in some ways that makes Thursday’s moves, or lack thereof, more frustrating. They always have money to spend – and don’t let them convince you otherwise – but convincing the San Francisco Giants to take on the entire remainder of Devers’ behemoth contract gave Breslow payroll flexibility this season and for years to come. The Red Sox also have a top-ranked farm system from which to deal talent. Entering this season, Baseball American declared Boston’s farm No. 1 for the first time since they began their organizational rankings over 40 years ago.

The Red Sox did very little of either. Matz is owed approximately $4.1 million, and the Red Sox will have to pay the remainder of May’s $2.135 million salary. Boston flipped outfield prospect James Tibbs III from the Devers trade, to the Dodgers, and paired him with fellow outfield prospect Zach Ehrhard. Blaze Jordan went to the Cardinals for Matz.

You could argue that the Red Sox appeared more committed to buying last season, when chief baseball officer Craig Breslow made five trades in five days leading up to the ‘24 deadline.

Yet the perception of quantity doesn’t guarantee actualized quality. With the benefit of hindsight, we know last year’s moves made little difference when the season was all said and done. The ‘24 Red Sox were not better for adding. Thankfully, they haven’t been worse off without the players they gave up, either.

The perception this year is that the Red Sox underwhelmed yet again. Fans watched the Mariners get infield slugger Eugenio Suarez, and the Yankees stock up on players. The Rangers outbid the Red Sox for Merrill Kelly. It’s hard not to worry that several American League postseason hopefuls are about to shove Boston out of the race.

In the immediate aftermath, it doesn’t mean much that the Red Sox were, as Breslow said when he fielded questions over videoconference an hour after the deadline, willing to part with any player in their farm system. Nor that they were “uncomfortably aggressive” in their attempts, because attempts are just that.

“We couldn’t go into this with untouchables, and we didn’t,” he said. “We were willing to talk about all of our guys in the name of improving the team. It just didn’t work out.”

The Red Sox were unwilling to part with anyone from the 26-man roster, Breslow said. Perhaps that would have moved the needle. The Padres were eager to acquire Jarren Duran, for example.

However, the fact that several starting pitchers around the league went untraded, including Dylan Cease, Joe Ryan, Sandy Alcantara, and Zac Gallen, speaks more to the teams that opted to hold on to them than failure on the part of Boston and other potential buyers.

After years of quiet and fruitless trade deadlines and postseason-less finishes, your frustrations are justified, Red Sox Nation.

“I understand the frustration and the disappointment,” said Breslow when I asked what he would say to fans. “There’s not a lot of sympathy for how hard we tried to get deals across the line. I understand that.

“We believe that we have a really young, exciting, talented team, and one that is capable of continuing to perform at this level and make it to the postseason… The decisions that were made at this deadline, they weren’t driven by, like I said, an unwillingness to be aggressive. They weren’t driven by taking a highlighted or reinforced view of 2026 or 2027. We were aggressively pursuing additions that could help us in 2025, and they didn’t line up.

“But I think if fans were in the office during this deadline, they would see that guys that we maybe didn’t expect to be willing to talk about going into these conversations, that we made available, and we tried to put the most aggressive offers that we could in hopes that they were going to end in deals. And sometimes they did, and sometimes they don’t.”

If it helps, Breslow didn’t seem particularly thrilled with Thursday’s outcome, either.

“I think all of those emotions can be true at the same time,” he said. “We’re happy with the guys that we brought in, with Steven and Dustin, but we also pursued real impact players that we felt like could improve our team in ‘25 and beyond.”

For now, it’s a small consolation that the pursuit of quality is the reason for a lack of quantity.

But maybe we should wait and see how it all plays out. Not much else we can do, anyway.