On Tuesday, the Red Sox did the thing that feels obvious in September and looks a lot murkier in April: they made Chad Tracy their permanent manager, handing the 41-year-old a three-year deal through 2029 with a club option for 2030. In the same breath, they exercised the 2029 and 2030 options on chief baseball officer Craig Breslow. Team president Sam Kennedy called it "continuity and stability" in the "sacred relationship" between a head of baseball operations and a manager, and told the Fenway news conference, "This organization is on solid footing."
Hard to argue with the mood. Boston fired Alex Cora on April 25 with the team sitting at 10-17, promoted Tracy from the interim chair, and then watched him post a 74-55 record from there through the announcement, the second-best mark in the American League and fifth-best in baseball as of that Sept. 22 snapshot. On June 24 they were 32-46 and 15½ games back in the AL East. Then came a run that reads like a typo: 15 straight wins from July 3 through July 22, matching the franchise record set by the 1946 club, and a 27-3 stretch from July 3 through Aug. 7, the best 30-game run in team history. They clinched a wild-card berth on Sunday, two days before the news conference. Tracy, told about the deal in a clubhouse meeting about 15 minutes before he faced the cameras, said, "That was cool. I choked up a little bit."
Good for him, it's a genuinely great story. It's also only 129 games.
My take, and I'll call it opinion rather than fact: the fairer test of a manager is a full season he owns from Opening Day to the finish, not a rescue mission that starts 27 games in. Tracy inherited a roster mid-crisis, caught fire, and rode it into October. That's a real accomplishment. It isn't the same body of evidence as running a clubhouse through spring training, an April cold snap, the trade deadline, and a September grind while everyone knows you're the guy. A hot 30-game stretch tells you a team can play. It doesn't tell you the manager can build and sustain one over 162.
Teams keep making this bet, and the results are mixed at best. Baltimore once handed Dave Trembley the permanent job after a modest 29-25 interim run, extending him on Aug. 22; the Orioles began a nine-game losing streak that same night. That's the cautionary end. The other end is Brian Snitker, named Atlanta's interim manager in May 2016 and its permanent one that October, who then ran a long, successful tenure before stepping down in 2025. So no, the gamble isn't doomed. But it isn't the sure thing the September glow makes it look like, either.
The timing is what nudges me toward skepticism. Boston is rewarding a manager on a small sample and, in the same move, rewarding a GM who was fielding job-security questions during that very 10-17 start. Breslow's three seasons in charge have produced a 254-226 record, third-best in the AL, so this isn't a naked panic move. But there's a tidy circularity to a front office using a summer turnaround to validate both the manager it promoted and itself.
For contrast, look at what the Mets did within days. They fired Carlos Mendoza in late June, promoted Andy Green to interim, went 37-38 the rest of the way, finished 71-85 in the NL East basement, and still gave Green a three-year deal through 2029. On the pure on-field ledger, Boston's case is far stronger. Tracy actually turned a lost season into a playoff team; Green's never turned at all. If you're going to make this kind of commitment, do it on Tracy's evidence, not Green's.
None of this means the Red Sox got it wrong. Tracy may well be exactly who they think he is, and I'd rather bet on the guy who went 74-55 than the guy who went 37-38. But the honest way to judge this hire is to hold off on the coronation. Give him a full season he starts himself, with the pressure of expectation instead of the freedom of a rescue job, and see if the September story survives a January-to-October one. As of this writing, Boston is headed into a Wild Card Series that begins Sept. 29. The real referendum on this contract starts next spring.
