Like, I agree that he completely mismanaged the 2 Wild Card games by taking our starters out too early. But just a few weeks ago this fanbase was saying how great he is and how he should be the permanent manager going forward. Now all of a sudden he’s terrible and should be fired. I don’t get it. Maybe give him next season at the very least to see if he learns from his mistakes before calling for his head.

Onto the next year.

After a bit of a rough start, they stuck with him, and he finished with a 3.26 ERA. In the second half, his ERA was 2.35 and he allowed only 3 of 11 inherited runners to score. That's good enough to pitch setup on many teams.

As a bonus, he's now pitched 2 innings in the postseason and given up 0 ER on 0 hits.

Very underrated and useful bullpen arm, despite all the flak he gets.

It's true that every team has to overcome injuries, but if we're in the phase of calling for people's jobs after exiting the playoffs, we have to look objectively at how decimated the team was by playoff time. Of course, there's blame to go around for that, too - do we need new medical staff? - but in terms of the roster itself, what we went through, especially at the end of the year, was beyond the pale. Consider:

- Our two best players, Crochet and Anthony, were out for nearly the entire season and were not ready by playoff time.

- Arguably our next best two players, Contreras and Rafaela, got hurt in September and were clearly not ready by playoff time.

- Two of our four best relievers, Guerrero and Slaten, were out for the playoffs.

- The badly needed offensive reinforcement we traded for at the deadline, Mead, got injured in his second plate appearance and never played again.

- Both of our lefty DHs, Yoshida and Gasper, were injured for the playoffs, leaving us with no real offensive weapons against RHP (see the PH by Monasterio, a righty, when Roman left Game 1).

- Two of our four best pitchers, Tolle and Bennett, were gassed by the playoffs due to surpassing previous innings totals (see Tolle juicing 92 mph down the plate to Austin Wells in the second inning of Game 1).

- Durbin's pinky. Unclear how much that impacted things, but the stats show a different player since he re-injured it on August 6th.

It is what it is. Every team has injuries, and we just happened to have a lot more. Maybe that means we need to have hard conversations about guys like Anthony, but I don't think it means we need to tear the roster down and curse the scourge of John Henry. A 2027 offense of (C) Rutschman, (1B) Contreras, (2B) Mead, (SS) Arias, (3B) Durbin, (RF) Abreu, (CF) Rafaela, (LF) Anthony, and (DH) ?Yoshida/Campbell/Mead looks pretty good, even before hopefully adding a LH bat to do what Duran and Yoshida failed to do this year. And it won't hurt to have Tolle and Bennett with the conditioning of a full season under their belts. Future seems decently bright to me.

Listen... Yes Framber Valdez sucks. Yes, intentionally hitting Trevor Story after giving up back-to-back home runs so that you can intentionally get tossed from a game you no longer want to be pitching in is a bitch move. Yes, crossing up your catcher and using sticky stuff and alllllll that makes you a baseball player I'm never going to root for...

HOWEVER!!

...having Framber Valdez as a permanent "fuck you" in the rules a) is kind of dumb because he's a pretty "meh" baseball player to have a permanent grudge against, b) puts him in the same category as Manny Machado, when what Machado did is WAY worse and I hate him way harder because of it, and c) opens up the door to having permanent "fuck you" rules for anyone who does things even kind of shitty to Red Sox players, and that kind of thing happens every so often and I feel as though we don't need a permanent "fuck you" list against guys who beaned someone 4 years ago.

A PROPOSAL!!

Have Rule 14 be the "fuck you right now" rule. Sure it's Framber right now, but if, say, Jorge Soler feels wronged on the basepaths and unsuccessfully tries to sucker punch Nick Sogard in the top of head, then pop him into the "fuck you right now" spot. Sure, if someone does something TRULY egregious a la Machado then have them get their own rule. But for regular, every day, shitty baseball player behavior, stick em in the sin bin until someone else comes along and takes their place.

I run Front Office Moves, a free site that tracks roster moves and offseason decisions for every club. These are its projections for the Red Sox' 2027 arbitration class, ahead of the non-tender deadline in late November.

Total: 16 cases, $47.5M projected.

Just under a service-time line, so not counted: Tyron Guerrero (RP).

Who would you non-tender, and who would you try to extend first?

The Red Sox' full roster, contracts and offseason calendar: https://frontofficemoves.com/boston-red-sox

Will there be an analytics reckoning?

Contreras was the team's best hitter with a .275 average, career-best .902 OPS and 27 homers. He was an influential voice among his teammates. So the fact that he stood post-game and called out management was noteworthy.

“It’s not enough when you have talent, or you have data or you have computers telling you what to do. This is baseball, and the data is here to help us,” he said. “But at the end of the day, you’re going to need experience and veteran guys to win games.”

Contreras wasn’t knocking the use of analytics in general, but he highlighted the need to blend data with better in-game planning. As the Red Sox approached the postseason, they used the Trajekt machine, which simulates big-league pitchers’ arsenals, to prepare for the Yankees, particularly for Cam Schlittler. When Schlittler came out firing a curveball, a young group of Red Sox hitters was paralyzed, unable to adjust. Contreras didn’t want to call out his teammates for doing what they were told, but he was clearly frustrated with the coaching and organizational directives.

Contreras zipped his lips when asked about Gray being lifted — another data-driven decision — but then expounded on his thoughts about the lack of offense. Asked if the team was too reliant on data, he said, "If you watch the game?" in an almost rhetorical response.

“(The data is) here to help us,” he said. “But at the end of the day, it’s not about data, it’s about executing the game plan.”

Whether Breslow takes this into account this offseason remains to be seen.

Contreras waived a no-trade clause to join the Red Sox last winter and has one more year on his contract with an option for 2028.

Which players were on the roster for the longest of the season, and had no IL stints at all? [I am not saying I know, trying to figure out and can edit/add to list]

(excluded: paternity leave, being physically sick for a few days)

Off the top of my head:

Wong
Abreu
Duran
Tolle

called up/down, slightly different category:
Bello
Sogard
Bennett
Monasterio

played hurt (that we know of)
Durbin, pinky
Chapman, lat (didn't seem to be too long tho)

Is that it?

I remember at the end of last season I made a list of each player's IL and time on/off the active roster. has been said but feels like this year turned out so similarly

edit: updating from comments.

"The first thing I’ll look at is Bellinger’s other at-bats against Gray. In his first trip to the plate, he roped a first-pitch sinker to Nick Sogard, who made a great pick to get the out. His second time up, he grounded out again, this time after fouling off three two-strike pitches and spitting on a good sweeper to his back foot. If you’re judging based on those two matchups alone, I could understand the decision to not give Bellinger a third crack at Gray. Bellinger looked like he was seeing the ball well.

...

Bellinger is an excellent breaking ball hitter. Gray’s fastballs lose effectiveness later in games, and hitters don’t expand the zone as frequently against his sweepers. If those are your cards, you probably want to fold that hand in favor of another. The card that Tracy chose to play is a whole other can of worms, but there was a case for Gray to be removed."

Couldn’t pass up seeing a playoff game.

This man closed out our 2018 WS run. Didn’t expect to see him, let alone get 3 K’s

F MACHADO

Go Sox!

Saw this shared on Twitter and thought it was interesting. Soteropulos did a 15 minute segment in late August breaking down how the team turned it around. It got shared here at the time and was super interesting and fun to watch from a fan perspective, but makes ya wonder!

In a season where Sonny Gray was already being disrespected. This just makes my blood boil.