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The Boston Red Sox – A Team Without an Identity… Yet

I sit here on the day of the Boston Marathon having just watched the now 9-13 Boston Red Sox try their very hardest to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. They manage to just barely split the series against the Detroit Tigers, and I think to myself: “How did we get here.” 

Flash back to September 9, 2019. The Red Sox have just wrapped up a painful loss against the Yankees, but the big news is not about what happened on the field that day; it’s about what happened in the front office during the game. Reports slowly started to trickle in that Dave Dombrowski – then president of baseball operations for the Red Sox – was fired during the game and was seen leaving the facility. This unceremonious end to an almost four year tenure only ten months after winning the World Series marked a potential inflection point in the trajectory of the ball club. And boy, was it one. 

Fast forward to 2026 and the Red Sox have traded their homegrown first ballot Hall of Famer Mookie Betts for virtually nothing but shedding David Price’s salary and Connor Wong. They’ve lost Xander Bogaerts to the San Diego Padres because they refused to extend him earlier in his career and let him get to free agency. Fired Chaim Bloom, the GM they forced to trade Betts, because he could not put together a winning team. Had to interview more than six candidates for the general manager vacancy (and had more withdraw from consideration before an interview) before finally landing on Craig Breslow, who they initially wanted to just head their pitching development pipeline in the minor leagues. They traded their most recent franchise cornerstone in the recently extended Devers by mid June of 2025, and by the start of the 2026 season already parted with every return in that deal. 

That’s how we got here – through years of bad decisions and even worse outcomes from the decisions they managed to pull off. So what next?

Coming out of an off-season that began with President of Baseball Operations Craig Breslow saying that home runs “are a foolproof way to put runs on the board” (Gabrielle Starr – Boston Herald) and ended with a roster focused on run prevention and bat to ball skills, you could be forgiven for not seeing the cohesive vision of the decision making powers at be. That directly leads us to the next major issue.

The roster is currently a bit of a mess.

The team has five everyday starting caliber outfielders on the active 26-man roster, new acquisition Caleb Durbin is off to a rough start, and the starting pitching has struggled mightily to this point in the season.

Garrett Crochet (admittedly off to a bad start) is and will continue to be a stalwart through his extension, but behind him the rotation is a ton of question marks. The Red Sox signed Ranger Suárez to a lucrative deal, traded for a 36 year old Sonny Gray (whose nickname is Pickles by the way, thank you baseball reference), behind him have Brayan Bello trying to reinvent himself for what feels like the fourth year in a row, and have a rookie fifth starter in Connelly Early who is promising but should not be relied upon at this point in his very young career. 

On top of this precarious pile of starting pitching, they have a bullpen with firepower at the end in Garrett Whitlock and Aroldis Chapman, but other than that are uninspiring at best. Thus far, Rule 5 draft pick Ryan Watson has pitched meaningful innings (to an 8.10 ERA), and the likes of unheralded prospects Jack Anderson and Tyler Uberstine have each had appearances. 

But surely the Boston Red Sox have a potent offense, right? Wrong. The “bat to ball skill” Red Sox are currently 11th in strikeouts as a team, while also being 25th in OPS and 29th in home runs. Putting the ball in play is one thing, but it helps if there is any amount of authority behind the contact. 

There are bright spots on this team, of course. Wilyer Abreu continues to be an excellent all around player, as a defender and a top to middle of the order bat. Ceddanne Rafaela and his gold glove pedigree has begun to show signs of learning how to change his approach at the plate and continues to have the clutch factor gene. Roman Anthony and Marcelo Mayer are both up in MLB to stay, and playing almost every day. 

Commonly, people will speak about teams as being greater as a whole than the sum of all its parts. This seems to be the exact opposite of what is happening with the Red Sox. With a roster of talented individuals, the outcome on the field thus far has been significantly worse than what you see on paper. 

There is no surprise that for the one year they had Alex Bregman they achieved what they set out to do and made the playoffs for the first time since 2021. It’s also not a coincidence that Alex Bregman has not missed the playoffs in nine consecutive years – he brings a winning mentality on the field AND in the clubhouse with the team. 

In that lies the kernel of what this team’s identity truly is – a fractured group of individuals all working in different directions without the leadership to pull them together as a cohesive unit.

More succinctly, unless they can right the ship:

They’re the team that moved on from Mookie Betts, Xander Bogaerts, and Rafael Devers – and it shows.