'Did that really happen?' How the Red Sox went from 10-17 to the postseason

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  Tim KeownSep 21, 2026, 07:00 AM ET

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  • Senior Writer for ESPN The Magazine
  • Columnist for ESPN.com
  • Author of five books (3 NYT best-sellers)

ARLINGTON, TEXAS -- The scene reads like a spy movie set in a minor league stadium: bottom of the fourth inning in Worcester's Polar Park, and the manager is quietly informed that he needs to walk into the tunnel -- but be careful not to raise suspicions. He is handed a phone -- his is back in his office -- and told by the caller to retreat there, close the door and use his own phone to make another call. He is given no clues, only instructions.

It was all very clandestine, maybe unnecessarily so, but Chad Tracy did as he was told. He stood in the tunnel, ended the call with Boston Red Sox farm director Brian Abraham, handed the phone back to mental-skills coach Jake Chaplin, walked up the tunnel to the clubhouse, and then his office, and closed the door.

Out on the field, Worcester catcher Mickey Gasper, now a budding Boston folk hero, looked around and wondered where the hell his manager went.

"Middle of the game, and he's not in the dugout," Gasper says now. "I was confused, like, 'Hey guys, where's our manager? Anybody seen our manager?'"

As instructed, Tracy had called his boss, Craig Breslow, the team's chief baseball officer. Breslow told him the team had fired manager Alex Cora and five other coaches. Tracy was chosen to take over for Cora, starting the next day, April 26, in Baltimore.

Tracy digested the news and collapsed into his chair. At 40, he had reached the pinnacle of his profession, one of 30 jobs in the whole world, and among the many thoughts that swirled through his mind, one carried the clearest signal: Is it OK to be happy?

"You could work 20 years at this and never get this chance," Tracy said this week, sitting in the third-base dugout at Globe Life Stadium in Arlington. "I was playing that mental juggle: sad for my counterparts and friends who just lost their jobs, and ecstatic for the opportunity ahead of me."

He didn't have time to strategize; he just flew to Baltimore to manage his first game and, on the way there, tried to outline a plan. The Red Sox were a mess (or he wouldn't have been there). He knew he had to address the team and the newly reconfigured staff. He knew that communication with some veteran players had been fractured by Cora's managerial style, so there were individual meetings that needed to take place.

He stood in front of the team that Sunday morning, barely 15 hours after plopping into his office chair, and looked out at 26 frustrated ballplayers. They were 10-17, and they were frustrated -- which Tracy took as a good sign, because frustration is far better than acceptance. He figured he had five minutes to find the right words, or at least avoid the wrong ones, because even though he'd managed many of them before in Triple-A, this was something completely different.

"I'm not here to kick the door down," he told them. "I'm not going to bum-rush in here and start changing everything. I'm here to help."

He said nothing about baseball. "Not about our record," he said last week, "not about X's and O's, not about fundamentals, not about bunting. None of that." Tracy has an unintimidating, friendly look but a surprisingly commanding voice. The brim of his cap settles in around brow height, as if it's a quarter-size too big, and his close-cropped beard makes him look like he popped out of an outdoors catalog.

"I told myself, 'Make sure you leave the room and everybody is like, 'ahh'" -- here he stops, breathes in and lets loose a heavy sigh before continuing. "If I could get them to just breathe that sigh of relief and say, 'It's going to take time, but we'll be OK.' That was what that meeting was about for me."

As he walked away, sensing he had succeeded, he knew a tougher task lay ahead: trying to convince 26 guys to believe that a team that had done nothing could accomplish anything.

IT DIDN'T HAPPEN immediately, or even particularly quickly. In late June, the Red Sox were still 14 games under .500 and the worst team in the American League after losing two of three to the Colorado Rockies. It looked and felt like they were done.

And then their season changed on a tarmac.

They couldn't get out of Denver, and they couldn't get off their plane, so they sat there for several hours waiting for the weather to clear and the plane to get off the ground. Hour after hour the plane sat, but nobody inside it could. Everybody was up, the players walking from the back of the plane to the front, the staff walking from the front to the back. They laughed and screamed and swore, a great intermingling of personalities and jobs and ages, a rare opportunity to break down walls and commiserate in mutual misery.

"When you get stuck in a metal tube with people for however many hours, you have no choice but to joke and yell about it," Tracy said. "And it turns out, you unify around it. We knew this could be something we use as an excuse for why we didn't play well that night, or it could be used as a reason why the group came together."

So much of a ballplayer's life is easy. Everything is provided. The travel is first class -- no TSA lines, the hotels are luxurious. The clubhouses are like kings' chambers -- they throw their dirty clothes on the floor after a game and they reappear the next day, smelling of detergent and hanging in their lockers. They toss their spikes into a shopping cart after every game and return to find them shined and lined up perfectly. There are chefs and masseuses, curated smoothies and every flavor of M&M's. Somebody loads their luggage into a bus and it magically appears in their hotel rooms.

Adversity is usually defined by what happens on the field. An injury, a losing streak, four or five hitless games. This, however, felt like real life, like the gilded trappings of their profession had been stripped and left by the side of the road. That plane sat on that tarmac so long they didn't arrive in Boston until 6 a.m. First pitch for the opener of a four-game series against the Yankees was less than 13 hours away. They went home and tried to sleep for a while, then went to Fenway. They won that night, and then they won the next three against the Yankees to sweep, and they decided they liked it so much they turned it into a 15-game winning streak and launched a 32-5 stretch that included another 10-game winning streak.

"We got off that plane and everything changed," Tracy said. "For whatever reason. Everything."

Over the course of roughly 50 days, the Red Sox went from the worst team in the American League to a lock for one of the American League wild-card spots (they clinched that postseason spot Sunday). They won in every way imaginable. They scored early, they scored late, they made wild defensive plays, their league-best bullpen closed out game after game. Willson Contreras kept irritating opponents and hitting bombs. Caleb Durbin went from one of the worst players in the league -- "just getting crushed," Tracy said -- to putting together a season with a WAR above 4. Aroldis Chapman, at 38 in his 17th season, kept throwing the ball faster and more accurately than logic would dictate. Payton Tolle and his joy entered Red Sox lore.

A season that seemed lost, significant only for the unexpected firing of Cora, acquired a totally new plot. The Red Sox -- this dour group of mismatched underachievers -- became fun.

NOBODY IS MORE fun -- or has more fun -- than rookie left-handed starting pitcher Payton Tolle. The sneakers in his locker have "GOT" written across the heel of the left shoe and "JOY" in the same spot on the right. It's one of many tributes to his mom, Jina, who died less than three years ago after a long fight with cancer. Payton, an old soul in a 23-year-old body, is the guy who hugs everybody -- even a runner he meets on his way to first on a tapper toward the mound -- and does a pushup after falling down while delivering a pitch. He elicits involuntary smiles just by walking around. Which is all why it's easy to miss that his joy -- his unbridled, unhinged, we-get-to-do-this-for-a-living joy -- is rooted in overcoming sorrow.

"My mom talked a lot about joy," he said, "and that's kind of my M.O. It's just something that I keep going back to, something that helps me with perspective. Something that keeps her here with me."

He's also really good, the best rookie pitcher in the AL, and his emergence has helped to soften the loss of ace Garret Crochet. He's 6-foot-6 and 250, which makes him stand out on a team with an inordinate number of hydrant-shaped humans: Gasper, Caleb Durbin, Wilyer Abreu, Jahmai Jones. Everything about Tolle is big: fastball, personality, mustache.

"I'm learning every day," he said. "I'm trying to figure out what I can try once a game, what I can try 100 times a game."

Tolle began the game Sept. 13 against the Royals by striking out Nick Loftin and Bobby Witt Jr. on six pitches, every one between 96 and 98 mph. He threw two more fastballs to get to 0-2 against Jac Caglianone, one strike away from a perfect inning. He stepped onto the rubber, took two deep breaths and snuck a look into the Red Sox dugout. He smiled, his baleen mustache widening, the look both mischievous and innocent. Get a load of this, it said.

He had reached this point once before, in high school, and "gripped a little bit and threw a fastball down," he said. He had gotten 7/9ths of the way there once in the minors, he said, which means his mind was finely attuned to the idea of completing an immaculate inning even before he smiled at everyone in the dugout and threw a 98 mph four-seamer past Caglianone.

"Absolutely no doubt I'm aware of that kind of stuff," he said. "Yeah, very aware -- probably to a fault."

IT'S ALWAYS DIFFICULT to pinpoint an exact moment, or series of moments, that turn seasons around. The games and series and cities blur, and by the end of the season it can seem as if they've played one long game that began in March. But the Red Sox, almost to a man, point to travel issues as the force that galvanized their season.

"Planes have definitely been interesting this year," Tolle said.

After the tortuous trip from Denver to Boston, just before the All-Star break, mechanical issues in Chicago forced the Red Sox back to their hotel rooms instead of heading to New York to play the Mets on July 10. They were back at the airport that morning, boarded the plane and landed in New York roughly two hours before first pitch. They bussed directly to Citi Field and won the seventh game of the 15-game win streak.

"Nobody complained," infielder Isiah Kiner-Falefa said of what has become known as the "Show and Go" game. "You're set up to lose in that situation, but the guys kept going. I think it was the defining moment of the season."

Tolle, not surprisingly, has his own take:

"Every single time I tell this, I have to sit down and think, 'Did that really happen?' And yes, it did. We were in Chicago playing the White Sox at the beginning of our (15-game) streak, and somebody hit a ball down the line. The umpire threw his hands up -- foul -- and then immediately changed it to fair. And at that moment, I was like, 'This is something that finally went our way.' I feel like that was the marker for us -- foul turned fair."

JIM TRACY MANAGED three big league teams over the course of 11 seasons, from 2001 to 2012: five with the Dodgers, two with the Pirates and four with the Rockies. Through all those seasons and all those games, his calm demeanor belied the turmoil within.

Nearly every Red Sox player praised Jim's son, Chad, for the same thing. Sources in the organization said calmness and consistency were the two qualities essential for anyone who hoped to succeed following Cora, and it seems Chad Tracy succeeded.

"Keeping calm no matter what," infielder Isiah Kiner-Falefa said. "Never up, never down. There's fire, but every day it's consistent. We play hard for him, and the way we play embodies what we think of him."

Now, Jim plays the role of good dad, happy to watch the games and support his son and be there if there are questions. "I bounce ideas off him, bounce stresses off him," Chad said. "Baseball eats me alive, man. It's all I do. It's all I care about. When we're in the room after a loss, I'm immediately, 'What could I have done better? What do we got for tomorrow? How can we win tomorrow?'"

Asked if that's a healthy approach, he says, "No. Probably not," but that's where Jim comes in. "When I'm stressed out about something, it's reassuring to hear someone on the other side say, 'Yeah, that's perfectly normal. I went through all the same stuff.'"

(At one point during a pregame interview in Texas, Chad was asked for a status update on injured pitcher Justin Slaten. "There were degenerative changes in the flexor mass," Tracy said, and there's not a chance in the world his father ever uttered a sentence that occupied the same time zone as that one.)

Tracy conducts himself with a straight-ahead focus that rarely seems to visit the margins. To a man, the Red Sox say he has a remarkable ability to summon the same reaction after horrible losses and wild wins. "A calming presence," Tolle said. "At the beginning there was a lot of 'What is going on?' around here. Panic, losing, and hey where did our coaches go? It was a whole lot of unknown, but he never changed."

ON THE FINAL night of last week's three-game series in Texas, after two unremarkable, low-energy losses that recalled the early season Red Sox, the Rangers headed to the eighth inning with a 3-2 lead and closer Jacob Latz on the mound. Through the first 25 innings of the series, the Red Sox had presented exactly zero reasons to expect anything dramatic. A subtle shifting of vibes wafted through the air.

And then, with a runner on, Trevor Story hit a rocket to the stands in left and the Red Sox won 4-3. Like a good travel fiasco, Story's swing changed everything.

The Red Sox bounced off the field, blasted music in the clubhouse and outfitted their rookies -- in a time-honored end-of-season road-trip tradition -- in creative ways. Tolle was sausaged into an orange Lorax outfit (size: medium). Gasper was a spot-on Mario, his doppelganger, while Nate Eaton was Luigi. Roman Anthony wore a diaper. Tracy, not excluded despite his position, sat behind his desk in full regalia as Woody from Toy Story.

Story's swing reclaimed their world, made it safe to laugh and be laughed at. All their bags were packed and loaded, the uniforms ready to be laundered and hung up the next day in Tampa. The plane left Dallas on time. As omens go, no one could be completely sure whether it was good or bad.