Since Theo Epstein left the Red Sox after the 2011 season, the average Red Sox baseball boss has enjoyed roughly the same lifespan as a well-cared-for hamster. Each of Boston’s last three top decision-makers were out after nearly four years on the job, and among the challenges new chief baseball officer Craig Breslow faces is figuring out how to buck that trend.

Will winning be enough? It wasn’t for Ben Cherington or Dave Dombrowski, who both won World Series championships during their brief tenures. How about building a sustainable farm system? You could argue Chaim Bloom did exactly the job he was hired to do, and yet he was still canned after consecutive last place finishes.

Obviously Breslow will have to thread a particular needle, but there are a few things he can do to ensure his time in the big chair lasts a little longer.

Swing big, don’t miss

The one thing all three of Boston’s recent baseball bosses struggled with was nailing the big moves. There have been some huge, high-profile successes, the original Chris Sale trade and the J.D. Martinez signing chief among them, but a lot of misses as well.

Cherington spent a combined $250 million on Pablo Sandoval, Hanley Ramirez and Rusney Castillo in 2014, who collectively tallied 1.7 wins above replacement for the Red Sox, less than Connor Wong recorded last season on his own. Dombrowski signed David Price to a seven-year, $217 million deal, which the former Cy Young winner barely made it halfway through in Boston, and later Sale to his current five-year, $145 million extension. So far Sale has only pitched 151 innings over 31 starts through the first four years of that contract, basically the equivalent of one full season.

Bloom didn’t hand out as many big contracts, but one of his biggest — Trevor Story’s six-year, $140 million deal — has gotten off to a rocky start. So far Story’s been plagued by injury and has only appeared in 137 games through his first two seasons with the club.

These setbacks have arguably taught Red Sox ownership the wrong lessons and could be partially why the front office has seemed so gun-shy recently. But if Breslow is going to succeed, he’s not only going to have to make some big deals, but hit on them too.

Keep prospect pipeline flowing

It’s not easy to win at a high level and maintain a consistent flow of young talent, but perennial contenders like the Los Angeles Dodgers and Houston Astros have shown it’s possible, and Red Sox ownership has made it clear they expect to do it as well.

Right now Breslow is set up nicely for the near-term, with two top 20 prospects in Marcelo Mayer and Roman Anthony along with impressive depth in both the upper and lower levels of the minors. The Red Sox have benefitted from having higher draft picks in recent years, but if the club starts winning like it’s supposed to then it’ll start picking later, putting blue chippers like Mayer and Kyle Teel out of reach.

Instead the club will have to hit on the players it has access to, continue bringing in premium international talent and develop players once they’re in the program. It’s not like the Dodgers and Astros have been picking at the top of the draft recently, and yet every year they have a new crop of youngsters come along to fill the inevitable holes that pop up.

Improve pitching development

The Red Sox have done well developing young talent these past few years, but the problem is the majority of the club’s recent success stories have been position players, with fewer homegrown pitchers coming up through the ranks.

Luckily, pitching development has been Breslow’s specialty and his success with the Chicago Cubs is among the main reasons he got the big chair in Boston. In a few short years the Cubs went from having one of the worst pitching development programs to one of the best, and lately Chicago’s enjoyed a bounty of young arms who have come up and made an impact at the big league level.

This has been one of Boston’s biggest organizational weaknesses for years, and if Breslow can help tap a fresh pipeline of young pitchers, the Red Sox could really start taking off.

Don’t hoard youngsters

Now, as important as it is to have a robust farm system, there’s a difference between maintaining depth and hoarding talent. Bloom arguably crossed this line over the past two years, failing to use the depth he’d built to bolster the big league roster.

In some respects, this is one area Dombrowski doesn’t get enough credit.

For all the talk that Dombrowski gutted the Red Sox farm system, he rarely dealt a prospect the club wound up regretting. He also had a knack for moving on from the right guy, most notably his decision to include the more highly rated Yoan Moncada in the Sale trade over Rafael Devers. Devers, obviously, has gone on to become the much better MLB player.

For the Red Sox to reach their full potential Breslow will have to draw from the club’s organizational depth, and right now one of the best ways Boston can improve its roster is by dealing from its impressive collection of infield prospects. If we believe Devers, Mayer, Story and Triston Casas are going to form the club’s starting infield for the next half-decade, then players like Nick Yorke, Blaze Jordan and Chase Meidroth — highly regarded youngsters whose big league paths could be blocked — should all be on the table to land an MLB piece who can help right away.

Win

This is so obvious that it should go without saying, but the decade-long roller coaster of ups and downs has to end. For too long the Red Sox have fallen into a pattern of boom or bust, and if Breslow hopes to stick around he needs to establish a floor so that when the club has a down year, it’s more of a third-place, second or third Wild Card type of season and not a free fall out of contention.

If Breslow succeeds, we could be looking at another decade-long run like the Red Sox enjoyed in their heyday under Epstein. If not, we could be having this same conversation four years from now about the next guy.