The Red Sox gave their postseason push a jolt of stability on Tuesday, but they also left themselves open to second-guessing.
Boston removed Chad Tracy’s interim label and locked him in with a three-year deal that runs through 2029, plus a club option for 2030. At the same time, the team exercised Craig Breslow’s 2029 and 2030 club options. The moves came in the same press release, just as the Red Sox were settling into a likely American League Wild Card Series rematch with the Yankees at Yankee Stadium.
Tracy’s promotion makes him the 49th manager in Red Sox history. He took over after Alex Cora was fired, with Boston sitting at 12-17. Since then, the Red Sox have gone 74-55.
The timing is impossible to ignore. Boston clinched a playoff berth two days ago, and the club is headed into a pressure-filled October stage against its biggest rival. That alone makes the Tracy announcement feel like more than a routine housekeeping move, even if the front office almost certainly had it mapped out well before Tuesday.
Still, there’s a reasonable case that the Red Sox did the right thing here. Tracy has earned the job. He inherited a toxic situation and has blown past expectations in a season that has already become the most historic turnaround in club history.
The Breslow part is where things get messy.
Breslow was the one who pushed for Cora’s firing in April, and that call has worked out in the short term. But his overall run as chief baseball officer has been a mixed bag across nearly four years. The last six months have looked good for him, but the bigger body of work still includes some painful misses.
Among the moves that continue to hang around his neck: the Chris Sale trade, the Rafael Devers debacle, and Alex Bregman’s botched free agency.
Not long ago, Breslow looked like a sitting duck. His future and his reputation were both on shaky ground until Boston’s unlikely surge changed everything. Before this run, his tenure looked like a stretch of mediocre front-office work, with questions about his ability to relate to and communicate with others lingering in the background.
Now, because of one extraordinary winning streak, that entire picture has been rewritten. Breslow is under contract through 2030, and the Red Sox are betting that the version of him they’ve seen over the past six months is the real one.
That’s the move that could come back to haunt them.
In Other News...
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For a team whose identity has long been tied to the Steinbrenner family, the bigger picture matters just as much as the price tag. The family still holds just over 60 percent of the club, keeping control in familiar hands even as outside capital becomes a bigger part of the modern baseball landscape. What this shift means for the Yankees day to day is still unfolding, but the sale alone shows how far the financial power structure around the sport has moved. [Read more 🡒]
Yankees Triple-A Era Ended With A Twist Fans Never Saw Coming
The Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders went out with a little bit of everything in their final game under that name, edging Jacksonville 6-5 in 10 innings on Sept. 19. In a fittingly strange finish for a longtime Yankees Triple-A affiliate, catcher Edinson Duran wound up taking on pitching duty and was credited with the win, giving the club one last memorable night before the name change.
The scheduled season finale the next day never got played, with rain and unplayable field conditions bringing the curtain down early on the RailRiders era. The franchise is set to rebrand for the 2027 season, which means the Yankees' top minor league stop has now closed one chapter before the next one officially begins. [Read more 🡒]