For the second season in a row, the Boston Red Sox ended their season with a Wild Card Series loss to the New York Yankees in the Bronx.
The Yankees outscored the Red Sox 18-2 and swept them in two games.
“The way it ended Wednesday night in New York was painful and deeply disappointing to all of us,” Red Sox president and CEO Sam Kennedy said.
That outcome brought many questions for team leadership, including the topic of who made the decision to pull Boston’s starting pitchers in the Wild Card games. Starters Payton Tolle and Sonny Gray had respectively allowed one run into the fifth inning when they were removed from the ballgames. Both games ended with 9 runs on the scoreboard for New York.
“The decisions are mine,” Red Sox manager Chad Tracy said. “As far as that specific one (pulling the starters), my decision. That obviously didn’t go great. That falls on me, so do we have data analytics? Of course we do. Everybody does. Is somebody standing there pushing me, saying, ‘You need to do this, this and this’? Absolutely not.”
Tracy was recently named the official manager of the Boston Red Sox. He took over as the interim manager when the Sox fired Alex Cora in late April.
The Red Sox slumped to 14 games under .500 by late June. Then, they won a historic 15-straight games and went 27-3 over 30 games, but that didn’t last into the final stretch of the season. The Sox finished the regular season 87-75 in third place in the AL East.
“We didn’t capitalize on our summer success,” Red Sox Chief Baseball Officer Craig Breslow said. “I think that’s the feeling that’s echoing in my head, and ultimately we fell short of the goals we set out to accomplish, but I wouldn’t want that to overshadow some of the incredible accomplishments of the players we had.”
Kennedy and Breslow both stated numerous times that the team’s yearly goal is to compete for and win a World Series. Boston 25’s Lauren Walsh asked Breslow how close or far the Sox are to a return to the World Series.
“We have some work to do, but I think if you were to ask the 26 guys in the clubhouse if they feel like they can compete with the best teams in our league, they would say yes. We didn’t do that when we needed to.”
Chad Tracy added that he and Breslow had a two-plus hour meeting with team leader Willson Contreras on this past season and the next one.
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