Chad Tracy inherited a 10-17 team in April. Boston just gave him a three-year contract.
The Red Sox named Tracy, 41, the 49th manager in franchise history on Tuesday, on a deal running through 2029 with a club option for 2030. Boston also exercised its 2029 and 2030 options on Chief Baseball Officer Craig Breslow, 46.
The numbers are ridiculous
Tracy took over on April 26 after Alex Cora was fired. Boston was 10-17, a .370 winning percentage, tied for the second-worst record in the American League.
Under Tracy the Red Sox have gone 74-55, a .574 clip that ranks second in the AL and fifth in all of baseball over that span.
Then there is the stretch that made this hire inevitable. From July 3 through Aug. 7, Boston went 27-3. That is the best 30-game run in the history of a franchise that has been playing baseball since 1901.
Inside it sat a 15-game winning streak from July 3 to July 22, tying a club record held only by the 1946 Red Sox. Boston finished July at 21-4, the best winning percentage in any calendar month in team history with a minimum of 20 games.
He earned it the slow way
Tracy was not a celebrity hire. Texas drafted him in the third round out of Pepperdine in 2006, and he played eight professional seasons in the Rangers, Rockies and Royals systems without reaching the majors as a player.
He managed Triple-A Worcester starting in 2022 and posted a winning record in each of four full seasons. He picked up his 499th career minor league managerial win on April 25, one day before Boston called him up.
That is a man who spent two decades in the sport before anyone outside the organization knew his name.
Breslow gets his flowers too
Breslow was hired Oct. 25, 2023, and Boston has gone 254-226 across his three seasons, third-best in the AL and ninth-best in MLB. Firing Cora 27 games into a season was his call, and it was the right one.
He is a 2013 World Series champion as a Red Sox player and only the fourth former Boston player to run the club’s baseball operations, the first since Haywood Sullivan left the GM chair in 1983.
Kennedy said the quiet part
“Craig and Chad are two exceptionally talented leaders who have earned these opportunities in very different ways,” said Red Sox President and CEO Sam Kennedy.
“Chad was asked to step into a difficult situation with little notice, but the trust he immediately commanded at the major league level was earned through years of work across our organization,” Kennedy added.
Now comes the hard part
Boston has clinched a playoff berth and closes the regular season at home against the Cubs with seeding still in play. Tracy’s first October is about to begin with a likely Wild Card matchup against the Yankees.
Interim managers get graded on regular seasons. Permanent ones get graded on Octobers. Tracy just changed job descriptions.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.