2026 Red Sox/MLB Season Thread

[Vermont Green]

Jones sucks. The guy is barely batting over .200, basically an automatic out. Put Mead in. They need guys that can at least give them a chance to score a run.

And now he pulls Gray after 70 pitches.. 

Yep, just keep sending Jones out there. Brilliant

So you put Miller in after he gave up a run last night and then you go to Crochet?

Pathetic. Click.

Just a horrendous job by Tracy. It is an elimination game.

NEW YORK -- With the Boston bats ice cold at Yankee Stadium again, a couple of quick hooks by Red Sox rookie manager Chad Tracy led to another early postseason exit.

And top starter Sonny Gray wasn't happy about being lifted after only 70 pitches.

"I think I'm the best pitcher in the American League going through the order a third time. I think that's a fact," Gray said. "I would have liked to have been trusted in that moment."

Not a great showing by Tracy in his post season debut.

[BitterJim]

Jones sucks. The guy is barely batting over .200, basically an automatic out. Put Mead in. They need guys that can at least give them a chance to score a run.

And now he pulls Gray after 70 pitches.. 

Yep, just keep sending Jones out there. Brilliant

So you put Miller in after he gave up a run last night and then you go to Crochet?

Pathetic. Click.

Just a horrendous job by Tracy. It is an elimination game.

NEW YORK -- With the Boston bats ice cold at Yankee Stadium again, a couple of quick hooks by Red Sox rookie manager Chad Tracy led to another early postseason exit.

And top starter Sonny Gray wasn't happy about being lifted after only 70 pitches.

"I think I'm the best pitcher in the American League going through the order a third time. I think that's a fact," Gray said. "I would have liked to have been trusted in that moment."

Not a great showing by Tracy in his post season debut.

I wonder if it's a case where an experienced bench coach would have helped. Having a rookie manager is hard enough, but having the whole coaching staff made up of people promoted in the organization left us pretty low on MLB playoff experience. Getting some outside experienced coaches should be a requirement for next year.

Hmmm, that sounds familiar...

[Goldstar88]

Jones sucks. The guy is barely batting over .200, basically an automatic out. Put Mead in. They need guys that can at least give them a chance to score a run.

And now he pulls Gray after 70 pitches.. 

Yep, just keep sending Jones out there. Brilliant

So you put Miller in after he gave up a run last night and then you go to Crochet?

Pathetic. Click.

Just a horrendous job by Tracy. It is an elimination game.

NEW YORK -- With the Boston bats ice cold at Yankee Stadium again, a couple of quick hooks by Red Sox rookie manager Chad Tracy led to another early postseason exit.

And top starter Sonny Gray wasn't happy about being lifted after only 70 pitches.

"I think I'm the best pitcher in the American League going through the order a third time. I think that's a fact," Gray said. "I would have liked to have been trusted in that moment."

Not a great showing by Tracy in his post season debut.

I wonder if it's a case where an experienced bench coach would have helped. Having a rookie manager is hard enough, but having the whole coaching staff made up of people promoted in the organization left us pretty low on MLB playoff experience. Getting some outside experienced coaches should be a requirement for next year.

Hmmm, that sounds familiar...

Except one coach won a championship. 

[Roy H.]

Jones sucks. The guy is barely batting over .200, basically an automatic out. Put Mead in. They need guys that can at least give them a chance to score a run.

And now he pulls Gray after 70 pitches.. 

Yep, just keep sending Jones out there. Brilliant

So you put Miller in after he gave up a run last night and then you go to Crochet?

Pathetic. Click.

Just a horrendous job by Tracy. It is an elimination game.

NEW YORK -- With the Boston bats ice cold at Yankee Stadium again, a couple of quick hooks by Red Sox rookie manager Chad Tracy led to another early postseason exit.

And top starter Sonny Gray wasn't happy about being lifted after only 70 pitches.

"I think I'm the best pitcher in the American League going through the order a third time. I think that's a fact," Gray said. "I would have liked to have been trusted in that moment."

Not a great showing by Tracy in his post season debut.

I wonder if it's a case where an experienced bench coach would have helped. Having a rookie manager is hard enough, but having the whole coaching staff made up of people promoted in the organization left us pretty low on MLB playoff experience. Getting some outside experienced coaches should be a requirement for next year.

Hmmm, that sounds familiar...

Except one coach won a championship. 

With a very experienced and respected bench coach, followed by two dismal playoff runs after that bench coach took a head coaching job elsewhere.

[greg683x]

I see Adley finally got a hit in the postseason.  He was like 0-23 with us the past several years, really frustrating.

EDIT:  I?m sorry, apparently he?s had 2 other hits in his career.  I always remember him being nonexistent in the postseason (along with just about every other orioles hitter not named Anthony Santander)

[rocknrollforyoursoul]

Gray wasn't his sharpest, but he was likely to do better than Boston's middling middle relievers, who were bad for the second straight game. And I think Contreras is right about today's overreliance on analytics.

I also think Boston should've waited to lift Tracy's "interim" tag until after the season. Then again, maybe it doesn't matter, because it seems that the manager?whoever it might be?is just a puppet for Breslow, and Breslow's just a puppet for Henry, and Henry's not invested in titles as he used to be.

I dispute that the Sox had a good season; they had a magnificent 5 weeks in the middle of the season and were awful for the rest of it. Since the awful part was much larger than the magnificent part, that tells me that the team is much closer to awful than it is to magnificent.

In my view, the "build from within" approach isn't working for the lineup. Up to this point?which is all the data we have?Mayer's a bust, Campbell's a bust, and Anthony's a good (maybe great) hitter who can't stay healthy.

Overall, the roster has many issues. Contreras had a great season but is 34, and there's no other proven big bopper on the roster?Abreu seems like a consistent 25-homer guy at best, Mead (when healthy) has yet to prove himself over a large sample size, Story is past his prime (33), injury prone, and not long for this team, and Durbin and Rafaela are decent but not powerful hitters. Duran seems like a lost cause, and Wong and Rutschman didn't produce much, though I'm willing to give Rutschman more time.

For pitching, will Gray be back, or did Tracy drive him out of town? Will Chapman be back? Can Houck and Crawford get healthy and stay healthy? The middle-relief group seems to have too many questionable (at best) guys, especially after what we just saw against the Yankees.

Perhaps the biggest problem is Henry's current unwillingness to spend big money on proven hitters. In an age of homer-happy baseball, Boston doesn't even have a 30-homer guy, yet the passed on Schwarber, and passed on Alonso, passed on Suarez, and probably some I'm missing. Offense is a much bigger issue for this team right now than pitching is, and they're not suddenly gonna get a big scoring boost from Story/Durbin/Yoshida/Duran/Wong/Rafaela, and maybe not from Mead/Rutschman. There are just too many guys who are unproven, or who have proven to be not great hitters.

All in all, it seems to me that the team will continue to try to build mostly from within instead of spending big on proven hitters, and I don't think that'll work, and the "bridge decade" will continue.

The Sox made the playoffs on the strength of one excellent 5-week stretch, and I think that stretch is going to hurt them, because it enables Henry & Co. to say, "Look! What an awesome stretch we had! And we made the playoffs! Our plan is working!" And they'll hold to their present course and things won't really get better. Because Henry doesn't really care if the Sox get knocked out in the first round (again). Because "they made the playoffs!"

But there probably won't be any baseball next season anyway, sooo...

[byennie]

If we were the Yankees, Mets or Dodgers we'd have just kept Sale, Schwarber and Devers and have 80 homeruns at 1B/DH and another #1 starter. Sigh.

[Goldstar88]

If we were the Yankees, Mets or Dodgers we'd have just kept Sale, Schwarber and Devers and have 80 homeruns at 1B/DH and another #1 starter. Sigh.

Could not agree more. The Sox are basically the Oakland Athletics now. Awesome. 

[Vermont Green]

If we were the Yankees, Mets or Dodgers we'd have just kept Sale, Schwarber and Devers and have 80 homeruns at 1B/DH and another #1 starter. Sigh.

Chris Sale is the one that is retrospect is the biggest miss.  I get Devers, maybe they could have handled things better and/or got more in the trade, but I understand why Devers had to go.  Schwarber is more of a missed opportunity.  He is a one dimensional player, who is old, and demanding a lot of money.  You have to be careful with those deals, they can backfire.  In this case, in retrospect, it would have been good to keep him.  But it is a judgement call.  You have to be careful those big contracts for old players, there is risk.  They ended up signing Story that year.  A reasonable choice, but one that ultimately proved to be the wrong choice.

But Sale, they got nothing for him and paid a bunch of his salary.  I don't understand why they didn't just keep him.  I never expected him to bounce back like he did, but why just dump him for essentially negative value.  They paid ATL to take him.  They would have been better off just keeping him on the 40 roster/IL, even if he never pitched well again.  Unless you believed that Vaughn Grissom was going to be a star.  And if that was the case, they got that massively wrong.

[Phantom255x]

They could have bought back Schwarber for 4/79M after 2021. They idiotically chose not to, and then ended up signing Story for 6/140M and Yoshida for 5/90M not long after. Horrible move not bringing him back, Schwarber is from around here and was the perfect power bat to have.

Also, I still don't think they've replaced Devers either. Hell, they didn't even keep Bregman beyond the 2025 season, and Roman Anthony has been oft-hurt so really they've had that hole in the lineup for a while. Devers owns the Yankees. Boy we could have used a bat like him in the wild card rounds. I don't even look at Contreras as a Devers/Bregman replacement, he plays a different position and also, Contreras was a big addition for 1B and to basically fill the theoretical hole left by Casas who is probably already cashed with all his injuries.

The bigger issue, why can't they just have 3-4 power bats in the same lineup? Why does a move need to require a loss somewhere else (ex. signing Bregman but trading Devers away). You could theoretically have Schwarber, Devers and Contreras in the same lineup for example, nothing was preventing that besides their own philosophies + budgets.