Chad Tracy didn’t hide from the move that helped define Boston’s exit.
After the Red Sox were beaten 9-2 by the Yankees on Wednesday night and sent home in the best-of-three American League wild-card series, Tracy defended the decision to pull Sonny Gray after just 4.2 innings and 70 pitches. Gray, Boston’s ace and an AL Cy Young contender, made it clear he wasn’t happy about being lifted.
Tracy, though, said the situation pushed him toward aggression.
"We're trailing," Tracy explained, per Phillip Martinez of SNY. "We're struggling to score runs.
And when you get in spots where struggling to score runs and you're already trailing, you feel like you've got to be aggressive and go. So they're getting back to the top part of the lineup.
They get a couple of hits against them. See if you can put it out.
And if you can put it out, you know, kind of lined up to where we want it to go. And that just didn't work."
The move came with Boston down 1-0. Tracy went to left-hander Erik Miller to face left-handed outfielder Cody Bellinger, and Bellinger answered with an RBI single that made it 2-0. The hit lit up the Yankees’ dugout and turned up the volume in a Bronx crowd that had been waiting to break loose.
It was the same script the night before. Tracy had gone to Miller for Payton Tolle after Tolle had thrown 83 pitches, and Miller later allowed a solo homer to designated hitter Ben Rice.
Tracy said after the loss that he was prepared to lean on his bullpen in a do-or-die setting.
"With [Garrett Crochet], [Garrett Whitlock] and [Aroldis Chapman] towards the back end there, and they were able to string a bunch of hits, and we couldn't stop the bleeding there," Tracy added during his postgame comments. "It was pretty obvious that we were going to be aggressive in using that group.
Like I said, they swung the bats. Didn't work out."
The Yankees wound up pouring it on anyway. Crochet and Whitlock combined to allow seven runs, with six of them coming in the bottom of the sixth as New York blew the game open.
For Tracy and Gray, the night ended with the same lingering question that shadowed the series: what might have happened if Boston’s starters had been allowed to go longer at Yankee Stadium.
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