After starting the season 10-17, the Red Sox clinched a playoff spot on Sunday. Mark Taylor/Getty ImagesTim KeownSep 21, 2026, 07:00 AM ETCloseSenior Writer for ESPN The Magazine Columnist for ESPN.com Author of five books (3 NYT best-sellers)Multiple AuthorsOpen Extended ReactionsARLINGTON, 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 Field 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 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 firs
