Former Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein has admitted in the last 24 hours to succumbing to the pressure of needing to win immediately in a market like Boston’s, saying he has some regrets about big free-agent signings he made in the final years of his tenure.

Epstein called it “giving in to the monster,” straying from his principles of building from within through the draft and player development. It’s a give-and-take struggle between the baseball and business sides of the organization that current Red Sox GM Ben Cherington acknowledge still exists.

He explained in an interview today on Boston sports radio station WEEI:

“I think Boston is like some bigger markets in baseball, where expectations are going to be high every year and along with that the business are different than they might be in a different city,” Cherington said. “In places like that, and certainly Boston is one of those, the success of the team on the field is the gasoline that runs the engine of the business and the business needs to run to then pay for that team on the field. There needs to be a symbiotic relationship between the baseball side and the business. And we need to have that here.

“In any relationship like that, there needs to be collaboration, but with collaboration sometimes there are necessary pushbacks. The business side should challenge baseball operations and baseball operations should challenge business side. There are some decisions baseball operations just makes on our own. There are others we collaborate on. Ultimately it’s up to us to execute on the decisions we make.

“There are some decisions we make that have greater business impact, so there’s going to be different stakeholders in those discussions, as there should be. That’s not any different than any of the other major markets, in baseball or any other sport.

“We’re not building a team in a vacuum here. In the end, building winning teams, that is the best recipe for the baseball business in Boston. It’s our job in baseball operations to go execute that. Every decision has a short, medium and long term impact. It’s our job to balance all those things.”