Gray, Crochet and swing away - your 2026 Boston Red Sox

This team gonna prevent the hell out some runs is what I heard

boring

What would you have written hotshot

I’ve jinxed the last two years so nothing 🥺

Nothing will ever top 'Sale, Price, Abad Deal' my crowning achievement on ILB and the cherry on top was that it annoyed Dr Morbius lol

Pain of 86 eh? I think that was one of the first things you ever told me about baseball, the appeal was the pain

I think he just hated the pun

I meant your pain of 86…Mets won that one

Oh I just enjoyed annoying Morbius on principle

Pretty wild that Early cracked the rotation, I’m stoked to see him on the reg

was it that much of a surprise? (honest question)
small sample, but he looked great when he got a chance last season. i was going after him in my fantasy leagues like he was a near lock to land a rotation spot.

Yeah it’s true I guess just usually when a GM trades for a guy (Oviedo) pride dictates that the guy plays

Chris Cotillo cautioned on reading too much into this this early in the season, he said that they wanted another arm who could give a few innings to piggyback Suarez and Bello as both didn’t pitch much in the WBC

Alex Cora on today’s game: “The tying run was on deck”

really annoyed at Cora hardmanning Narvaez yesterday for some unspecified reason, sitting him on a day Crochet pitches. Narvi is Crochet’s preferred catcher. so that’s great, thanks Alex. he also sits Roman and Marcelo. but then brings them in to PH in the 9th against one of the toughest closers in baseball. lol, no pressure fellas. of course Anthony promptly hits a dinger. huh wonder if that might have been useful earlier in the game, AC?

so sick of these chuckleheads taking 3-4 weeks to warm up every season, sick of the low baseball IQ, sick of the cute lineup games AC plays. it would be one thing if the Sox were 1-5 and playing okay but they’re playing really bad in most aspects of the game. they’re chasing bad pitches and striking out at crazy rates. you see guys like Contreras and Raffaella up there swinging before they even know what kind of pitch it is, just hoping their bat path magically meets the ball.

Rafaela has always been a free swinger, at this point he is who he is, players don’t tend to change their approach at the plate much because it really seems to be intrinsic

lol I always double the wrong letters with him, something in my brain has broken with that.

Is it April? Or is it Early May?

will crochet be announced as having 'forearm soreness' tomorrow y/n

: /

They just fired like 2/3 of their coaching staff

Lmao

my man charlie montoyo is available

people all like, it wasn’t cora, it’s breslow!! and i’m like

porque_no_los_dos.gif

it’ll take at least a year to get the mentality up to speed around fundamentals, baserunning, hitting the cutoff man, etc and that’s IF tracy or whoever actually focus on these things. Every single year the sox have a flat first few weeks of the season where it feels like they’re all learning anew how to play the game. so i don’t hold out huge hope for a big turnaround this year. the problems run deep. re the OF logjam, the yoshida problem, the lefty problem… idk man.

it’s so sad, this used to be a serious team

they all seem like very brittle alpha male types. people unable to have a conversation.

With all the young/youngish talent and Sonny Grey, I thought this was a team that could surprise people this season. Turns out the surprise was a different one

kind of weird to see trevor story acting like a team leader. dude has hit .243/.296/.405 in 4+ seasons with the sox while averaging 80 games a year

(tbf i have no idea who else might fill that role!)

Trevor Story is a team leader, the fact he’s off to a shitty start isn’t relevant to that.

Crochet on what Breslow and Kennedy told the team: “They made it very clear that we get paid to play baseball, and we need to just focus on playing baseball.”

ah the famed golden FO touch at Fenway, really warms your heart

it does seem quite possible looking at what people have said that a few hitting coaches were set to be fired and Cora said if they go i go. And Vtek maybe does the same. which suggests that Cora really was as checked out as he seemed like he was and took a chance to jump ship.

xp that was Whitlock, not Crochet.

so many Garretts

trevor story - why is he so bad and hated?

because he'll swing at anything as long as it's a foot off the plate outside, plus he's blocking the young maestro marcelo mayer from truly arriving at his best position.. and next year he might be blocking franklin arias. can't believe the team opt-out doesn't kick in until 2028 😭

None of which would matter if this team were willing to pay down some of his contract btw

I have never disliked Story fwiw

I don't dislike him! but at this point he's old and in the way

Old and in the way, hmm-mmm
Old and in the way, yeah, hmm-mmm

Once you hit 50, principals try to gently impart that message to you.

can't make b-ref do the full ballpark splits, but story has hit .303/.369/.603 in 375 games at coors field, .263/.326/.485 in 1092 games overall, and .243/.296/.405 in 347 games with boston

honestly not trying to bury the guy -- and it's admirable that as a veteran he stepped up to speak for the players with the media -- but jeez he's on a bad (6yr/$140m) contract

in any case, despite having spent 12 major league seasons with seven different clubs it kinda seems like craig breslow has somehow never dealt with actual people before? (also why even have john henry in the room if he's not going to say anything?)

john henry could be a full on weekend at bernie's situation for all we know

The only person associated with the Cora “regime” I can find who has left any kind of message to the fans is…. Catherine Varitek

maybe it’s because i live for messy red sox drama but cotillo’s take on this has the ring of truth

https://www.masslive.com/redsox/2026/04/as-red-sox-deem-clear-alex-coras-firing-a-craig-breslow-decision-it-was-also-an-act-of-self-preservation-chris-cotillo.html

cora has form here in having a direct line to the top brass. he shanked bloom so breslow shanked him first

that it might have been the right move at this point for the team is circumstantial

This comment also struck me

“Thinking about all those little league games Bloom and Breslow hung out at over the offseason and their "great relationship" and "very interesting conversations".
We laughed about how the Gray and Contreras deals were probably planned then, but there was probably a whole lot of bitching about Alex Cora too.”

2-0 in the chad tracy era

Mayer hitting line drives, walking, Narvaez hit an absolute laser over the fence as well, probably visualised Cora's face on the ball lol

literally the first time this team has been watchable all year

Mayer saying “we lost some guys we really love but we gained some guys we really love” lmao he fucking HATED Cora (and he was right)

i really want to know what Cora's beef with Narvaez was on the day he sat him, particularly given that he's Crochet's catcher. Crochet wound up allowing 5 and in the dugout Narvi looked like somebody had kicked his dog

it's interesting reading back through the Mayer psychodrama that Cora was responsible for in Spring Training. here's a quote from Mayer all the way back in *checks notes* March, about his time in the bigs last year

“I have peace in my mind that I know I’m really good at baseball, but it [ticked] me off that I didn’t play that way. It’s not about there being doubt that I’m good or not, or that I know I can hang. I know myself. I know who I am as a player. And I know I’m really good when I step onto the field. It was just I didn’t play the way that I wanted to and I feel like the whole year when I got up there, I was tinkering my swing and [changing] little things, and I was never really comfortable. So that’s really the part that [ticks] me off. That shouldn’t happen.”

“I was legit in the box thinking about everything but the baseball … You can’t really perform like that,” he said. “Every single week I was in the cage, my swing looked different. I was just tinkering with stuff that didn’t really need tinkering. I focused on the wrong things, which then led to me chasing, me doing all this stuff that really should have never happened.”

I mean...????!

“I looked at film from when I liked my swing the best, when I didn’t think about it much, when my moves were easy, and we worked from there,” said Mayer. “I feel really good right now. This is about the best I’ve felt as far as my swing."

Veterans who’d been in similar positions tried to guide Mayer, encouraging him to build more time into his day for managing all of his responsibilities. In particular, Willson Contreras and Story pushed Mayer to sharpen his routines. ...

Contreras was at times funny but blunt in offering feedback to Mayer — “He’s intense, very straightforward,” said Story — while Story offered lessons drawn from his own experience.

“Sometimes you’ve got to step back and look at your day kind of like a businessman. Are you really giving yourself enough time to do everything that you need to do?” said Story. “He’s learning his body, what he needs to do. There’s everyday core things that you have to do. You nail those every single day. They’re non-negotiable in setting yourself up for success.”

Mayer expressed appreciation for the message and messengers.

“It’s great to have those guys in the clubhouse. They have so much experience and knowledge,” he said.

he said, ROLLING HIS EYES

mayer more relaxed than trevor story or willson contreras will ever be... and that's a good thing

maybe just let marcelo... be marcelo

I would put money on Roman’s, er, even-handed response being a function of the constant Cora attacks on Mayer. THAT’S HIS BOYFRIEND, ALEX

Cora unfollowed Narvaez on Instagram but Narvaez hasn’t noticed. It really seems that once you clash with Cora once you’re dead to him. What a fucking cunt.

Also, remember when Marcelo injured his wrist last year, on an old injury that they’d let heal without surgery, and wanted to get surgery to fix it? Cora was out there going on about how Mayer CHOSE to get surgery. Yeah because he wants to continue playing and not prematurely shorten his career by fucking up his wrist for good?

obviously not news but it remains *amazing* that they fired alex cora when he got suspended, then fired his replacement a year later and rehired him when he was reinstated

that is all-time; could only be improved if they'd instead traded him to the phillies for a prospect last weekend

btw manager ron roenicke has been out of baseball since guiding the sox to a 24-36 record in the covid season

alex cora has this peter mandelson like ability to never be completely flushed away. would anybody actually be that surprised if during the upcoming offseason he’s announced as craig breslow’s replacement?

more seriously, it seems Crochet has told reporters that the reason he’s injured is because he didn’t prepare properly in spring training? this is the guy who declined the WBC in order to… *checks notes* prepare properly in spring training. what in the samhain is going on over there??

What in the Samhain? What?

What exactly is Andrew Bailey doing over there?

WOOF
https://i.postimg.cc/nzh9zQLq/IMG-3820.png

Awooooo

Contreras said it probably doesn’t help that the lineup has a number of young players who don’t have much experience in dealing with slumps, and minutes later, Marcelo Mayer seemed to take exception to that explanation.

“To me, that’s just kind of an excuse: blame the young guys,” said Mayer. “But at the end of the day, we’re all playing baseball, we’re all pros. We all know what we need to do. I don’t think we’re doing a good job with runners in scoring position. When you don’t do that, you don’t score runs.

“We had a lot of opportunities. We want to win every series and that’ one we thought we should have had. A lot of runners left on base. Just not good overall.”

https://i.postimg.cc/d3jmhmnQ/bafkreifw5oqxkglr5ocfkwubqxtvz7pe33ctprl3fp4oyezyvi4cyhaxmu.jpg

oh stop it cmon

although