Oh, what three weeks of a baseball season can do.
In that span, the Red Sox have surged from being Craig Breslow’s farrago of failure to the game’s most exciting team.
Interim manager Chad Tracy has gone from an anonymous pawn to a trending Wikipedia search.
Their franchise-tying 15-game win streak came to end Wednesday, but the season feels as if it’s only just beginning as the Red Sox went from the worst record in the American League as of June 24 to a wild-card contender.
The downward spiral reached rock bottom that week when the Red Sox dropped a series to the perennially pathetic Rockies. After a ninth-inning collapse on June 22 when Aroldis Chapman gave up three runs to blow the save in a 3-2 loss, Tracy sent a team text message standing by the players.
“I’m not gonna turn on you. I know what you’re going through. I’ve been here. All these losses, we’re doing it together, and we’re gonna find a way to win together,” Tracy wrote, per the Boston Globe. “When you guys are rolling in the [expletive], we’re rolling in it with you. And when we get to the point where all the flowers come out, we’ll be there with you.”
The team reportedly bought into that sentiment and, since then, has gone 21-4, clawing its way from 31-45 to 53-49 entering Saturday.
Tracy was dealt an impossible hand when Alex Cora was fired as the sacrificial lamb April 25 and he was promoted from Triple-A Worcester despite zero MLB management experience. That decision read as half-baked, but the organization felt Tracy’s healthy relationships with players who came up through the system and his ability to connect with young players were valuable.
The 46-year-old former minor leaguer has surged up the AL Manager of the Year betting market, jumping from 35/1 to 8/1 at FanDuel and climbing as much as 24 percentage points on Kalshi.
Aside from demonstrating effective on-field leadership, contending with a limited roster is the key to winning this award.
White Sox manager Will Venable leads the race at +115 since revitalizing a club that posted the worst record in history only two years ago to now AL Central leaders. Tampa Bay’s Kevin Cash remains the only other viable candidate, but after having won the award twice in the last six years, voters are craving a fresh narrative.
There are some conflicting signals here. While Venable remains the favorite, FanDuel currently gives the Red Sox slightly better odds to make the playoffs than the White Sox.
Even if Chicago does reach October, it’s not as though it had to navigate a gauntlet. The American League has been unusually wide open this season, and the AL Central has been — surprise, surprise — even softer. Another year of small payrolls and rebuilding cycles has the division on pace to finish with a combined winning percentage below .500 for the sixth straight season.
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The White Sox’s pitching pales in comparison to the Red Sox, so with another two months still to play, Tracy carries the upside.
And there’s no bias against interim managers either. The award has been won by two before: Jack McKeon in 2003 and Tracy’s father, Jim, in 2009.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
