Effectively Wild Episode 2471: The Red Sox Sackings

Summary

Effectively Wild Episode 2471: The Red Sox Sackings
April 28, 2026
Hosts: Ben Lindbergh (B), Meg Rowley (A)
Guest: Alex Speier (C, Boston Globe)

Main Theme / Purpose

This episode dives deeply into the shock-firing and mass layoff of Boston Red Sox manager Alex Cora and most of his coaching staff. The hosts analyze the events, organizational dynamics, rare timing, and implications for both the Red Sox’ future and broader baseball management. They are joined by Alex Speier for an insider’s breakdown, and also cover other MLB happenings and lighter topics near the end.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Overview of the Red Sox Coaching Mass Firing

• Mass firings after a blowout win: The Red Sox fired manager Alex Cora and nearly the entire coaching staff after a 17–1 win, leaving only pitching coaches in place. AAA manager Chad Tracy was promoted as interim manager, entering Boston's "Chad era." ([00:14])
• Unusual timing: Rare for MLB teams to clean house so early in the season; it's extra odd after a big win. Comparable to a "Boston Massacre," though the hosts note the dark humor and awkwardness of the timing. ([02:33])
• Players’ reactions: Red Sox veterans openly voiced displeasure. Craig Breslow (Chief Baseball Officer) communicated briefly with players, did not take questions—story quotes Garrett Whitlock and Trevor Story voicing their dissatisfaction and desire for clarity. ([05:50])
  • "They made it very clear that we get paid to play baseball and we need to just focus on playing baseball." —Ben Lindbergh paraphrasing Garrett Whitlock ([05:50])
• Alex Cora’s response: Cora texted/tweeted "happy" and indicated he’d be fine, even adding a winking emoji. Fired coaches memed their own departure with thumbs-down/up group photos. ([07:56])

2. The Rationale and Impact of the Firings

Organizational Dynamics

• Pitching staff's underperformance: Odd that pitching coaches remain when starting pitching has underperformed (injuries, regression of expected stars).
• Communication issues: Ongoing narrative in Boston: Breslow’s awkward or limited communication, both externally (media) and internally (players)—a factor both in roster moves (Devers episode) and in coaching decisions. ([03:43-10:55])
  • "[Breslow] is fanning the flames of bad situations rather than tamping them down and that's also a failure." —Meg Rowley ([12:31])

Implications For Leadership

• Firing so early shifts all blame: By making this move early, Breslow "owns" the season's outcome. If Boston fails from here, responsibility clearly falls on his decisions. ([04:25])
  • "Ain't no one to blame but you now, Craig... You're really in it now, you know. This is your show, friend." —Meg Rowley ([04:25])
• Unusual for a whole staff sweep: Housecleaning makes sense for clear direction but is disruptive for routines, relationships, and preparation—especially for a team meant to compete now. ([13:52-16:07])
• Coaching staff replacements: Most new staff are promoted from within (AAA/AA), which helps continuity with younger players but creates learning curve and preparation gaps for big-league operations. ([13:52-18:05])

3. Interview with Alex Speier (The Boston Globe)

[Starts ~53:37]

Immediate Context & Why This Happened

• Breslow had previously dismissed the idea of a shakeup even after a 2–8 start, citing continuity from a postseason appearance. The rapid reversal hints at organizational desperation. ([54:45-55:13])
  • "That's a lot that's changed in two and a half weeks." —Alex Speier ([55:13])
• The firing was "atypical" for the Red Sox, who historically avoid in-season firings, let alone wholesale purges. ([58:12])
  • "This is very atypical behavior for the organization." —Alex Speier ([58:12])

Who Stayed & Why

• Pitching vs. hitting: Pitching coaches (Andrew Bailey et al.) remained, despite poor rotation performance. Speier speculates that the staff with "driveline" backgrounds (data-driven, player development focus) are viewed more favorably by Breslow. ([59:05-62:44])
  • "Maybe there is a desire for more clarity...about messaging when it comes to training—especially the young players..." —Alex Speier ([61:25])

Speculation on Breslow’s Motives

• Despite extending key staff in the offseason, Breslow pulled the plug quickly—raising questions about his confidence in his hires and/or the severity of internal developmental concerns. ([65:07])
• The environment in Boston—pressurized, youth-heavy roster, high expectations—is challenging for development. This creates risk when removing veteran staff support. ([68:43-71:40])
• Breslow's future is now closely tied to team performance: "This is his organization now... The rest of the season is going to tell us an awful lot about that." ([69:46])

Player & Public Reactions

• The firings landed poorly with players; communication was swift, one-directional, and didn’t allow questions. Coaches' exit was publicly memed; Cora and company appear in high spirits ("buddy road movie" photos), but questions swirl about true feelings. ([72:46-75:17])
  • "No Q&A... raises the question of why did you do that in the middle of a series rather than on an off day?" —Alex Speier ([73:16])

Can the Team Recover?

• Tracy and other interim staff have solid relationships with younger players due to their AAA experience, which may cushion transition pains. But the hitting staff is less familiar, creating risk. ([76:00])
• Evaluating the moves: Boston will likely base “success” not only on wins but also on underlying developmental and performance-based KPIs for young players. However, short-term improvement is expected. ([83:17])

Organizational Instability

• Red Sox have been extremely volatile franchise, moving from bottom to top frequently. Some of this attributed to lack of veteran scaffolding, high media/fan pressure, and possibly recent resource deprioritization by ownership (Fenway Sports Group). ([85:01-86:36])
  • "Things get weird in Boston quickly when things start going badly." —Alex Speier ([88:36])

Cora’s Future

• Cora is expected to be in high demand for his next MLB managerial job, especially for win-now organizations, though there are questions about his strengths with younger rosters. ([89:55-91:11])

---

Additional Notable Quotes & Moments

• "Not since Four Seasons Total Landscaping have I seen a funnier PR fiasco than Coaches for Hire LLC." —Ben Lindbergh on the van hired to transport dismissed coaches ([08:42])
• "You gotta be able to talk like a person, you know." —Meg Rowley on leadership and communication ([10:25])
• "Dodgers are kind of okay, wow. Yeah, I know, it's so brave." —Meg Rowley, tongue-in-cheek, on the perennial favorites ([19:58-20:03])
• "Every team in baseball is bad this year, even the good ones." —Meg Rowley, wryly discussing this season’s chaos ([19:35])
• "If you think Coors is the moon, [Mexico City] is higher than the moon." —Ben Lindbergh, on run environments for expansion teams ([27:53])

---

Timestamps for Major Segments

• Red Sox Sacking & Analysis: [00:14–18:05]
  • Firing news, timing, reactions, organizational implications.
• Around the League Banter: [18:05–27:12]
  • Other struggling teams, surprise standings.
• Mexico City as Expansion Site/Slugfests: [27:19–36:07]
• Emerging Stars & Fun Statlines: [36:07–38:16]
  • Kevin McGonigle, Bobby Witt Jr., rookie pace banter.
• Interview: Alex Speier (Boston Globe): [53:37–91:32]
  • Insider view on Red Sox events, context, communication, speculation on future.
• Follow-up Listener Questions (Non-Red Sox): [92:05–98:40]
  • Home run cycles, home run robbery stats, and legacy discussions.

---

Memorable Moments

• The viral image and story of the "Coaches for Hire LLC" van, making the grave news seem almost like a comedy sketch. ([08:42])
• Public departure group photos of fired coaches, thumbs down then up, as a meme and coping mechanism. ([07:56])
• Real-time acknowledgment of managerial instability in Boston, leading to monthly "performance reviews" as an inside joke. ([91:58-92:00])

---

Quote Highlights With Timestamps

• [04:25] Meg Rowley: "Ain't no one to blame but you now, Craig... You're really in it now, you know. This is your show, friend."
• [05:50] Ben Lindbergh: "They made it very clear that we get paid to play baseball and we need to just focus on playing baseball." (paraphrasing Garrett Whitlock)
• [08:42] Ben Lindbergh: "Not since Four Seasons Total Landscaping have I seen a funnier PR fiasco than Coaches for Hire LLC."
• [10:25] Meg Rowley: "You gotta be able to talk like a person, you know."
• [12:31] Meg Rowley: "[Breslow] is fanning the flames of bad situations rather than tamping them down and that's also a failure."
• [55:13] Alex Speier: "That's a lot that's changed in two and a half weeks."
• [58:12] Alex Speier: "This is very atypical behavior for the organization."
• [61:25] Alex Speier: "Maybe there is a desire for more clarity...about messaging when it comes to training—especially the young players..."
• [65:07] Alex Speier: “It is bizarre timing to make that decision one month into the season and to decide that you're going to engage in that kind of wholesale change unless you're concerned about a rapidly deteriorating development environment..."
• [72:46] Ben Lindbergh: "Call an Uber, man!" (Reacting to the van incident)
• [88:36] Alex Speier: "Things get weird in Boston quickly when things start going badly."

---

Overall Tone and Takeaways

The episode is wry, analytical, and occasionally bemused, treating the Red Sox upheaval as both a symptom of modern management/communication breakdowns and the unique pressure-cooker environment in Boston. Lindbergh and Rowley apply their usual statistical rigor and dry humor, supported by Speier’s candid reporting, to deliver insight for both Red Sox fans and followers of MLB organizational drama.

Listeners will come away with:

• Detailed understanding of the events, motivations, and reactions around the Red Sox firings.
• Broader contextual knowledge about the rarity and risk of such moves in MLB.
• A strong sense of organizational volatility in Boston and questions looming about leadership and communication going forward.

Transcript

[A]

they say i waste my time tracking all these stat lines but it's here i found my kind they're all effectively

[B]

wild hello and welcome to episode twenty four seventy one of effectively wild a baseball podcast from fangraphs presented by our patreon supporters i am ben lindbergh of the ringer joined by meg rally for fan graphs hello mick hello well if you're a red sox coach condolences or congrats if you're alex cora he seems somewhat elated about it but we had a mass firing a mass layoff event on saturday i saw many comps to boston massacres saturday night massacres possibly in poor taste given other events from this past saturday but whatever you call it here's the tale of the tape it was not just manager alex kora fired but also most of his coaching staff hitting coach peter fatsy assistant hitting coach dylan lawson bench coach ramon vasquez third base sl outfield coach kyle hudson major league hitting strategist joe cronin not that joe cronin different living joe cronin and maybe also kind of jason veritech who was the game planning and run prevention coach who was euphemistically reassigned but it's not entirely clear that he cares to be reassigned so he's off the staff one way or another aaa manage chad tracy has been promoted to take over as the interim manager along with another chad chad epperson so the red sox are in their chad era maybe that will help and this was pretty shocking coming as early as it did in the season and so we will be devoting our interview to this topic today and we will be welcoming back the boston globe's own alex spear our red sox preview guest to talk about what happened here and why it happened in this way and at this time and the dust is still settling this is very much still a developing story and more will come out but we will talk to alex about what we know and what he knows but boy this was this was the story of baseball this weekend because it's early to jettison anyone and really to jettison almost an entire coaching staff at once mid season that very rarely happens to have it

[A]

come sort of coincidentally the day that they won a game seventeen to one yes and to leave intact the coaching side of things that pertains to pitching at a time when the pitching has been quite poor some of which is the result of injury but a lot of which is underperformance from established guys and guys who i think we expected to be much better to be a potential cy young contender my red sox world series pick is looking kind of shaky if i had to make it about me i think that timing was odd i think that craig breslow's communication style has been a topic of conversation on this pod and elsewhere prior to this i'm always mindful of wanting to be fair in my assessments of these things right because a lot of people are kind of awk when they talk about stuff and are they really being awkward or unhelpful in a way that is notable or are we just paying attention you know it's like the shark

[B]

attack thing although it is part of the job not to be that's awkward

[A]

in that way right there's always a limitation there and i do think it's worthwhile to sort of distinguish between how does a pobo or a chief baseball officer communicate externally versus how are they regarded internally not that communicating externally is an unimportant part of your job but one could imagine a scenario where maybe you do a less than stellar job talking to the media but like the guys like you right you have the guys you have the clubhouse that doesn't seem to be the case here i don't know that i can recall it's not like every single time a manager gets released the players are like whoopee finally he's out of here but very obvious that the way that this was handled intern has fallen flat that the players are displeased that the veteran players who are a little more comfortable voicing that displeasure on the record feel free to do so so they're in a weird spot and of course breslow remains and we'll we talk about this with alex but it's his show now one of the reasons that managers don't tend to get fired this early is because it's like super disruptive yeah the other reason and this is speculation on my part but one of the reasons i imagine that pobos and chief baseball officers and gm's are reticent to jettison their managers this early in the calendar is ain't no one to blame but you now craig you know like and that's not to say that this team will suddenly rebound or that it can't falter in ways that have an obvious culprit but you're really in it now you know this is your show friend a friend of the pod jake mintz asked about sort of whether these were his decisions and it's clear that they were i'm sure they weren't made alone but it sounds like he was the impetus for the move so you're gonna sink or swim on your own i suppose

[B]

yes yes and the players were not enthused and there were some quotes garrett whitlock was one of the guys who said that they made it very clear this is talking about breslow who met with the players briefly and didn't take questions they made it very clear that we get paid to play baseball and we need to just focus on playing baseball so kind of a shut up and dribble sort of situation and trevor story came out and said he was not satisfied by what he had heard and he wanted to talk to breslow more and clear the air and get some sense of the direction of the franchise etcetera of course it would help if the red sox players did play better trevor story included but but also i do and it's it's there's a lot that's kind of funny it's partly this happening after the blowout as you said the blowout win and we did a a stat blast back on episode twenty two oh two about how rare it is for managers to be fired following a win because usually managers get the ax after a loss and it's not unheard of for them to get fired after a win but at the time we did that stat blast in twenty twenty four i think it hadn't happened since twenty ten so it had been a while it had been a while you can't hit me with the song if i say it that way and i think you know it's it's uncommon and especially coming off of a blowout win i mean that made it kind of unintentionally funny and then the way that cora responded to it so he texted various reporters to say i'm happy and he tweeted happy and then he also evidently replied all to some red sox organization notice email about this to say that he and his family are going to be just fine and there was a winking emoji i mean is he protesting too much i don't know maybe we'll talk to alex about that and then the group photos that all the fired coaches took with veritech having thumbs down in the first of them and then in the next one because they're all just kind of a traveling roadshow now they all had their thumbs up they're almost like memeing it so that was pretty amusing according to sport radar alex cora was the first manager to get fired after winning a game by sixteen plus runs since the new york metropolitans fired bob ferguson falling in eighteen to two win over the cleveland spiders in the second game of a doubleheader on may thirtieth eighteen eighty seven so yeah you don't tend to see that very often and then of course the punchline of all of this was the coaches for hire llc van if anyone didn't see this oh boy the van that took the fired red sox coaches away the name of the van company was coaches for hire llc and when i saw chris cotillo tweet the photo of the van i honestly thought that this was photoshopped or something i thought it was a gag because there was no possible way that they would hire a van from coaches for hire llc to take away a group of coaches for hire that just seemed too on the nose not since four seasons total landscaping have i seen a funnier pr fiasco than coaches for higher llc so yeah do you think that when breslow broke the news to everyone he he said we're making moves do you think he used the alex cora oft repeated line from the red sox netflix documentary that he used for every single player that they demoted from major league camp and spring trading we're making

[A]

moves we're making moves we're making moves and this is right this is a good example of where i want to be fair because there are only so many ways to deliver that news and at the end of it you're being demoted and so you don't feel good regardless which doesn't mean that you shouldn't try to take care in delivering that news to players particularly because the whole idea is that they will at some point be a better fit for the roster mostly based on talent sometimes just based on necessity and be up and so you want to have a good relationship with them you want them to get better you you want this to be a temporary ro reassignment and there are only so many ways to say that but also just like why are you letting yourself be filmed saying it the same exact way every time man

[B]

yeah why couldn't netflix have been filming this season or any other season than that mostly boring season how many more red sox documentaries will we get now are we doomed to several more red

[A]

sox documentaries i mean the answer to that seems to be yes but that was probably true before this decision do you think that he keeps his the cora and co keep their jobs longer if the netflix screws around to film a second season of that documentary i think they might right because you're like oh i can't we can't give this to netflix right you gotta be able to talk like a person you know i think that this is this is an emerging theory for our time i think that good leaders can figure out how to talk like a person to

[B]

other people yeah in the chat gpt llm era it's probably even more important to be able to sound like a

[A]

human being right and i think that breslow's tenure has been a mixed bag at this point you know you mentioned this i don't want to like totally give away our interview here but you mentioned this in our conversation with alex like you didn't hate their off season i didn't hate their off season i thought that they were like there was an off outfield consolidation trade that failed to materialize that would have made their roster make more sense like it as it was put together it was sort of weird in its shape but i think especially because so much of their abundance came on the pitching side we're like well you know they're gonna need at some point right every team does every team needs pitching can you really have too good a staff let's see like and and our projections reflected the way that that staff was expected to be good you know they they were right up there at the top in our in our preseason projection so i i think that there are parts of what he has done that made a lot of sense they did get to the postseason last year i thought some of the moves that they made last year were smart i thought that the way that they reinforced their rotation this year was doubling down on a strength in a way that you know i like when teams do that but i think that when you point to some of the failures of his tenure there is sort of a common through line which is that they are either born of poor communication or exacerbated by poor communication i don't think that everything that went on with devers was like the fault of breslow and i'm sure that if you're a red sox fan and you're looking at how devers is hitting now like maybe you're just happy to be out from under that contract but it looked bad at the time in part because it just seemed like they could not get themselves on the same page with a player who was really important to the franchise having to move on from the majority of your major league coaching staff on you know april twenty fifth is an organizational failure that isn't to say that the team has been playing well and i don't really have a strong like allegiance to alex cora one way or the other i don't know maybe maybe it's good that he's out of there but you're making a an organizational failure look even worse by the way that you're communicating with your players and so you know at the very least like this should be a developmental goal for craig breslow he's setting developmental goals for the organization that's part of his job this is a developmental goal for him or it needs to be because as you said talking to people is part of your job when you're in that seat and the way he is communicating is fanning the flames of bad situations rather than tamping them down and that's also a failure

[B]

so craig yeah yeah i can't easily research this because i don't know if retrosheet has like coach hiring and firing dates and coaching staffs have expanded so much in recent years but it is rare for this many coaches to be let go at once certainly mid season i think basically because of the disruption that you mentioned yeah just it makes sense on paper i guess if you're going to clean house just do it just have a clean break and bring in new people because you could imagine sometimes it seems like a half measure you let the manager go and then you elevate the bench coach on an interim level and well how much are things actually going to change especially if the bench coach is a buddy of the manager which isn't always the case but often the coaching staff kind of comes together at the same time and the manager has some say over his staff and so if you just dismiss the manager but then keep everyone else in place well how much is everything actually going to change and then are people going to be sniping about how you let the manager go because he was their buddy or something so on that level it almost makes sense to just do a hard reset but i could imagine that it doesn't happen very often if ever like this because it must just be hard to kind of keep the routine going and i guess if you decide that the routine was a problem okay but still you know you have to elevate all these interim people and jose david flores is now the interim bench coach and pablo cabrera is the interim first base coach slash outfield instructor and then jack simonetti has been hired as the interim hitting assistant and then the promotions from aaa i mentioned the giga chads coming this is by the way this is not they hope this is not the big league chad tracy this is career leaguer chad tracy so don't confuse your chad's tracy

[A]

don't get don't get your chad tracy's confused make sure that when tagging your chad tracy's in a piece that you are tagging the cr yeah yeah chad tracy a nightmare ben a new you know what now i'm mad about it before i was just like an objective observer being like you guys seem like you really love mess over there but now i'm furious because you've made my

[B]

job harder gosh added colin hetzler to the hitting staff so right they have almost replaced all of the dismissed coaches not quite but still a lot of those guys even if they've been around the organization and aaa for years they're still just kind of not going to know the routine and where do we go and what time and you don't have now a lot of the aaa guys of course have long standing relationships with some of the younger red sox players which makes them natural people to take over whether on an interim basis or ultimately a full time basis permanent basis quote unquote permanent nothing is permanent when it comes to managers and coaches clearly but still they just kind of don't know their way like you know you have to prepare the season doesn't stop for you to regroup so you have to have your pre series meetings and you have to disseminate your scouting reports and all that stuff and make your lineups right there was some report that chad tracy i think was making his lineup on the plane but then the front office delivered a lineup to him which again optics but you know maybe coming in he has a lot on his plate so i think just that and maybe you think it's a kick in the pants and you need that but also there's probably some stuff that's going to be just slipping through the cracks from a preparation standpoint just because everyone's new here and they all have to learn the ropes too so that's probably why we don't see this with a team that is expecting to contend that is supposed to be good now so yeah it's unusual but could it work well we will talk to alex about that but i think the bones of the team still strong so we'll see if they can come together after this or whether this just mushrooms into an even bigger deal but we can move on to a bit of other banter and then we will return to the second biggest story in sports involving a new england sports teams head coach slash manager what is going on in in new england just all the sports teams scandal ridden year after year somehow punching above their weight in that

[A]

respect boy oh boy ben you just

[B]

said a mouthful so the interesting thing is that but it could be worse the red sox are not off to the worst start of a team this season that was expected to condense i mean you look at the the changes in playoff odds and you know carlos mendoza of the nets rob thompson of the phillies they have to be looking over at cora and saying well better he than me at least for now because yeah the red sox playoff odds are down about twenty six percentage points since the preseason and their odds of winning the division have completely crater the phillies and the mets are nine and nineteen each the red sox are eleven and seventeen after they won on sunday so they're already on the upward trajectory here but yeah it's been even worse for the phillies and the mets they are down thirty six percentage points and forty eight percentage points phillies and mets respectively mets got beaten by the rockies soundly this weekend so i guess the fact that they are both nl east teams has cushioned the blow a little bit but not that much because yeah things are pretty dire for them the royals are off to a rough start the astros are off to a rough start the blue jays have course corrected a little bit but still are not doing great i mean there are a lot of teams that had high expectations that have fallen far short of them

[A]

thus far i sort of jokingly remarked on blue sky a little while ago that i i think we have to entertain the idea that that every team in baseball is bad this year even the good ones yeah i think i stand by that you know because some of the ones that are good or at least off to good starts i i'm a little skeptical of their abilities to sustain i think the dodgers are

[B]

pretty good i'll go out on a limb and say i think the dodgers are kind of okay wow yeah i

[A]

know it's so brave you're just you know no one people don't talk about that enough they don't talk about out enough about how brave you are yes

[B]

although even they have a mere half game lead over i know the padres who are doing quite well themselves yeah

[A]

the nl west is is shaping up to be a fun a fun little time you know because you're right to say the padres as we're recording only half game out d backs fifteen and twelve only three and a half games back you know do i think they're going to win the division i don't but because they'd need at least least one good reliever for that to be a possibility but i'm trying to decide what i'm more surprised by the fact that the mets are nine and nineteen or that the braves are twenty and nine and i know that despite their injuries and they were myriad and despite the suspension jerks and profile they still

[B]

projected pretty well yeah projections vindicated thus

[A]

far yeah but in my mind i was like we're over projecting the braves i think and so i'm still surprised to see them twenty and nine but yeah like if you had told me on opening day that the nationals had a better record than either the phillies or the mets well i would have assumed that it was like the day after opening day and they had only played like one game so yeah there there are some surprises to be had but i don't know getting getting late

[B]

early yes so we'll see if any of them follow in the red sox footsteps although these days it'd be hard for them to wait for one of those teams to win you might be waiting a while if you wanted to ax your guys after i can't believe

[A]

the reds are eighteen and ten yeah how about that with two guys scoring essentially two hitters you know what if

[B]

they built the whole lineup out of ellie and s stewart that'd be a good idea but yeah i mean they're they've kind of been a run prevention team for a while now and you give them a couple of good hitters and a little luck and some one run wins etcetera and yeah reds off to a far better start than the reds sox and you know the dodgers they had a double challenge there was a double a dual challenge this weekend which was i guess not an accident but the cubs were playing the dodgers and nico horner who was hitting for the cubs and dalton rushing who is catching for the dodgers they both tried to challenge simultaneously the same pitch i wondered whether this would happen i think we even got an email about like would a hitter challenge a ball at some point because they might want to stay at the plate and say not take an intentional walk and keep swinging away or something like that would it would anyone ever make a challenge kind of against their interests and technically it doesn't go down in the books as a a double challenge but it it was in the moment because it was a three in one pitch it was a the second inning the dodgers ultimately won this game six to nothing on sunday but it was it was very amusing because it was three to nothing at the time and justin raski who had himself a fine start he he allowed a double and then walked a couple batters so the bases were loaded with one out and there was a a pitch three one pitch and they both immediately moved to challenge because rushing was anticipating that it might be called a ball and so he would want to get that changed to a strike so that they didn't walk in a run and horner was thinking that it wouldn't be a ball that it would be a strike and so he they both signaled to challenge and what happened ultimately because horner had started down the first baseline already and so i think rushing seeing that maybe was thinking that this would be a ball call and just didn't want to leave anything to chance so the home plate umpire who was malachi moore he called the pitch a strike and rushing didn't hear that evidently and so he just challenged kind of preemptively i guess and just to be safe and because it was a strike it went down as a challenge for horner and he lost the appeal and it was ruled that the pitch had caught the zone by half an inch or so and it ended up being important because horner struck out and then bregman grounded out and robleski and the dodgers emerged unscathed so joe davis called it the ultimate abs strike a double simultaneous challenge i wish it were recorded that way i think there's a decent case that it should be and that if you do that maybe you should pay a price maybe the umpire should have docked the dodgers a challenge and even though it was an accident and an instance of jumping the gun maybe it should be ruled a double challenge but unfortunately it is not but it basically was one yeah that's so wild yeah we saw some momentous challenges your mariners won on sunday after pinch hitter rob ref snider stayed alive after being quote unquote struck out out he challenged the strike call was overturned he stayed up there he hit a game winning homer in the ninth big win probability swing good challenge we also saw the first batter to have a bases loaded walk change to an inning ending strikeout brett beatty of the mets on sunday contributed to the rocky sweep so maybe there were more consequential challenges but none more entertaining than this duel challenge or challenge duel we also saw sort of red sox adjacent i just wanted to note for everyone that kyle harrison is off to a strong start for the brewers and i think he might be the new quinn priester he might be this season's quinn priester who was a pirates prospect who was sort of laundered through the red sox to the brewers the red sox had him briefly after he had failed to launch for the pirates and then the brewers acquired him from the red sox and he blossomed for them last season and turned into a real load bearing support strut of their rotation and had a strong year and i think kyle harrison is is off to the same sort of start harrison who was traded by the giants to the red sox in the des deal and then was flipped this past february by the red sox to the brewers in the caleb durbin deal and we talked a bit about durban's struggles at the start of the season but kyle harrison former top prospect for the giants he is having a very fine start and this is actually his best stretch of five starts i think since the very beginning of his career he kind of had a hot start when he came up a few years ago as a rookie but since then he has floundered a bit and so this is the best that he has been barely relative to any other stretch of start so maybe it's early yet it's a small sample but be on the lookout for another did the brewers fix a prospect who had failed to launch elsewhere and then the red sox didn't have for long before trading him to the brewers so another example maybe

[A]

yeah maybe and also relevant to our conversation because it's like who are you trading and who you keeping you know

[B]

indeed yes trading craig yes and speaking of the padres and their success so there was another mexico city series and there were a couple games played in mexico city and the second one was high scoring as it seemingly always is in mexico city and i just took a look at the the data because it was i think it was the diamondbacks and the padres were playing in mexico city right and they played just a couple of games there yeah i

[A]

think it was a two game set

[B]

there yes that's right and the second one was kind of a classic mexico city game just a slug fest and a wild back and forth affair or the the d backs ended up winning twelve to seven i think they scored like eleven unintered runs or something after falling behind the previous game was only six to four so not that abnormal but we've seen the history of games at altitude in mexico city it has been high scoring slugfest after high scoring slugfest as you would sort of expect so i just looked now we have a a sample of sixteen major league regular season games that have been played in mexico and the site of those has varied so initially they played in monterey and the stadium there was at high altitude but not nearly as high as mexico city so the monterey ballpark i think would be the second highest elevation ballpark in the majors were it in the majors after coors field but higher than chase field but it's only like i don't know two thousand feet above sea levels not super extreme whereas mexico city is higher than course it's way up there so all of these games have been at a high elevation but especially the mexico city games which are the most recent six of sixteen so i just i broke this down sixteen total games and the average scoring in these games has been thirteen point four runs the two teams combined over that same span so thirteen point four runs in all of the sixteen mexico games it was twelve point three in the monterey games and in the mexico city games it's fifteen point three so either way you slice it it's been extremely high scoring but especially high scoring in the higher ballpark as you would expect and this doesn't even count a couple of the they've played some exhibition games there too that were also extremely high scoring i wrote about this years ago at the ringer because they had played like a twenty one to six game the padres had been involved in a lot of these i think this was astros padres so yeah there was a twenty one to six and there was an eleven to one but even disregarding the spring training exhibition games it's been extremely high scoring and i wrote about this because rob manfred had mentioned and has mentioned many times that mexico city is a camp candidate for mlb expansion and of course he's getting serious about mlb expansion and wants to maybe have that worked out by the end of his tenure which is coming up in a few years do you think that this is viable i mean it makes sense as a market in a lot of respects sure just in terms of distance and population and appetite for baseball and everything but boy if you think that kors is the movement moon this is higher than the moon i mean this is you know this is like a couple thousand feet higher than cores and has produced correspondingly large run

[A]

totals yeah i think you're right that there there is a lot to recommend it as a market for an expansion team i think two things one i think that the the environment is is so extreme as to potentially be kind of problematic you know bad enough to be a visiting team having to go there but like we can't crack we haven't cracked course yet and we're going

[B]

to yeah the mexico city ballpark hangover

[A]

would be oh my gosh and i will also say that i think that there are expansion markets within the lower forty eight or montreal or vancouver ever

[B]

one of my favorite cities interested in in mounting a bid the mariners aren't

[A]

gonna let that happen but i mean there's no way that they'll allow their territory to be encroached upon by like that but i would make the blue jays games at safe or t mobile never in my life will i get that right interesting because like well you just pop over to vancouver are you satisfied with that anyway i think that there are cities in the us us and canada that are less logistically complicated for that reason that are good sites for potential expansion which doesn't mean that there can't be or shouldn't be a team in mexico i just wonder if mexico city is the right place to put it now i appreciate the appeal of it from a population perspective and like that is a huge metropolitan area with a huge economic engine and can support a franchise franchise but it does seem like it it poses a real problem like the way that the ball plays there just does pose a real problem and i don't know if you want to embrace that potential thorniness when other cities also present an attractive expansion opportunity and you wouldn't be playing on the moon or maybe you should just we could sell a team to elon musk and then we can play on mars quite a lot of travel yeah

[B]

that won't present any difficulties with gravity and lack of atmosphere etcetera but yeah i mean even if you rig up a humidor as they have everywhere these days it's it's hard even because of the i wrote about this back in the day i'll link to this piece but it it would be hard even because of the humidity or or lack thereof like a humidor wouldn't help that much it wouldn't have because the relative humidity during the summer months in mexico city is higher than fifty percent and so if you set the humidor at fifty percent relative humidity then it has an effect on the ball but if that's just the environment that wouldn't work so well so you couldn't just kind of keep cranking up the humidor i determined after talking to various people to correct for that so yeah that would be like you'd make the ball all too heavy it would have to be like sopping wet basically not to fly there so and then yeah there's the endurance issues and and all the rest and the pitch movement and and everything so yeah the numbers though like so they've been playing these regular season games in mexico since nineteen ninety six and i could have done a more rigorous version of this where i looked at the specific seasons and the specific teams and everything i didn't but i think it gives us ballpark so to speak estimate in mlb from ninety six to present the average run scoring both teams combined per game is nine point two runs in coors field games it's eleven point eight runs but in the mexico games i i cited earlier in the monterey ones it's twelve point three so higher than course and in the mexico city ones it's fifteen point three for an overall average of thirteen point four and of course the core scoring has been depressed somewhat by the fact that the rockies haven't had good hitters for a lot of that time but but even so without correcting for which teams made the trip to mexico it's yeah it it holds up as you would model it the actual results have shown that yeah it would even cores would pale in comparison to this sort of altitude so it's a real stumbling block or if you want to juice offense and you want to get those batting averages up and everything well maybe that's one recourse just put a team in

[A]

mexico city that'll help yeah and again like i don't want to discount the notion that there's a lot about baseball there that would be really appealing but i do think that you know it's a non trivial environmental consideration and one that would give me a lot of pause especially when there are other places that have like like a a real interest in having a major league team that don't have quite so extreme an environmental consideration to deal with so yeah

[B]

also you know how one of your bold preseason predictions was about well no i know you forget them instantly but you did have one about connor griffin

[A]

yes i did i remember that one

[B]

it's going great it's going great that he would what match or surpass mike trout with these ten point one one

[A]

war rookie war yeah that was truly

[B]

bold he did hit his first home run on his twentieth birthday so congrats conor but he is still at zero war on the season which i suppose means he is on pace for zero war so it turns out maybe you should have made that prediction about kevin mcgonagall i maybe should have yeah because he's actually on pace for eight point four war he's not very far off the the trout pace and trout himself the current model is on pace for seven war so that's exciting but also exciting yeah kevin mc donegal the number two prospect but the one who started on the big league roster and has just hit the ground sprinting i mean he's been fantastic as we talked about the other day but yeah on pace for an eleven homer eight point four war season so that's fun yeah bobby witt junior by the way is on pace for an eight point four war season with six homers i i don't think he will end up up with both of those numbers he might end up with the eight point four war but probably not with the six homers but he has hit one which is funny because it's like let's bring in the fences and then bobby wood junior has one home run not working out so well for him but he's still been good anyway kevin mcgonagall it turns out was the guy that we all should have been not that people weren't hyped about kevin mcgonagall i mean he had a fantastic spring training and was one of the best prospects in baseball about but yeah he's the one who has made it look easy thus far

[A]

yeah he he sure sure sure looks

[B]

like he belongs and i will give you one quick little stat blast here prompted by some news this weekend

[C]

interesting take it discuss it at length and

[B]

analyze it for us in amazing ways

[C]

here's today

[B]

so did you see that brandon phillips signed a one day contract to retire as a rental i did not see that well you might not have expected that that would happen because you probably expected that brandon phillips did retire already given that he has not been in the big league since twenty eighteen and you know we talked about the phenomenon the tradition of players quote unquote retiring long after everyone assumed that they had retired like they just announced i'm retired now and we all thought weren't you already but okay but we talked about the tradition of the one day contract i think this was prompted by nelson cruz signing a one day contract with the mariners to retire as a mariner so we talked about this on episode twenty one forty five in march of twenty twenty four when that happened and then we talked about the history of that happening and we had some follow ups about the longest gaps between actually playing and ostensibly not being retired and then actually retiring so brandon phillips has not been in the big leagues since twenty eighteen however what some people might have missed is that he did continue to play professional baseball he went to indie ball and he played for four more seasons after that so he played into his forties and played through the twenty twenty two season and he played in the pacific association even as well as the atlantic league and elsewhere so pacific association legend brandon phillips that makes it maybe a bit more understandable why he felt he had to declare his retirement because he had been more recently an active professional athlete than some people knew i guess and also there were people he was inducted into the reds hall of fame along with lou panella and reggie sanders and aaron harang reds hall of famer this weekend so i guess that was part of it anyway whatever i have no problem with players going back to get ever honored by their teams and their fan bases and take a last bow with that franchise yeah sure fine however i was curious about whether this happens as often as it used to not the one day contract part i wish that we could stop blast that but that's a little tougher but players who had a long run in the big leagues playing on after their big league careers ended ended how long is the typical major league afterlife and how many major leaguers even have an afterlife not the iowa cornfield kind and not becoming an archeologist like brad lydge but continuing to play baseball at a high level elsewhere because i know that this was kind of commonplace in the early days of baseball and professional baseball because back then while there weren't that many major league teams and the distinction between major leagues and other levels wasn't always that clear plus you didn't make enough money to retire young right so you had to keep doing something else and a lot of people they had non baseball jobs but also some people they kept playing baseball if they could and so there are tons of stories of long lasting big leaguers who then went on to just keep hanging on in the minors or they just went to the pacific coast league or something because back in those days before there were big league teams on the west coast the pacific coast league was almost kind of a quasi major league i mean it wasn't defined as such but it it had aspirations to be a big league and it was pretty darn professional and they played even more games per season because of the weather and there was a lot of support and you had like ted williams and joe dimaggio would start in the pacific coast league before they'd become big leaguers and then other guys they might just go on to have a a long lucrative career there and maybe it was closer to their homes or something they might actually prefer to play in the pcl in those days than in the big leagues but my sense was it was much more common by necessity players just had to keep playing baseball they couldn't just call it quits and hang it up so i asked kenny jacklin at baseball reference if he could run the numbers for me because they have i think the most comprehensive public database of minor leagues and indie leagues and international leagues and everything else so i asked him him if he could figure out so i asked him to look by decade so careers ending by decade from the nineteen hundreds through the two thousand ten s it's a little too early to run the numbers for the two thousand twenties yet but among players with ten or more mlb seasons and not really mlb but all major leagues and then broken down by the decade in which their career ended what percentage of them went on to play at least one additional season in some other league or level so has to be a whole new season not just like they got demoted from the majors to the minors that year and they played on no it has to be playing beyond their final major league season in another league at another level any qualifying pro league though i did specify to exclude winter ball just because you know that's still pro baseball and everything but it's just a a shorter commitment and you know it's more common for guys to keep playing winter ball in their home country or whatever it is so it largely the the data kind of matched my expectations which is that this has gotten a lot less common it is less common for guys to do what brandon phillips did because brandon phillips had a seventeen year major league career and made something like a hundred million bucks in salaries and decided that he hadn't had enough and i i commend that i yeah i kind it when a you know dallas kykal or someone just keeps bouncing around and they'll go overseas and they'll play in the minors and it's like doesn't matter if you had a a long or distinguished career they just you know it's it's for love of the game at that point so i i kind of romanticize it myself then i guess there's the non romanticized version which is the guys who basically get blackballed from the big leagues and want to keep playing you know there's the trevor bauer kind of case or the robinson cano case or the henry mejia you know not that he had as long a major league career but if mlb teams won't have you anymore because of whatever it is you know you were suspended for various things multiple times your persona non grata and then you you keep finding places to let you play so that's one way that this does still happen sometimes but i think the brandon phillips route is rarer so the numbers basically there was a a change i guess like going into the the sixties or so so careers that ended in the nineteen hundreds of the ninety four guys who had had ten year or longer major league careers at that point seventy four of them went on to play an additional non mlb post mlb season so seventy eight point seven percent of guys whose big league careers ended in the nineteen hundreds after a decade or more went on to play that's that's a lot so more than three quarters of them they weren't done when they were done as big leaguers in the nineteen tens it fell to sixty point eight percent still high the nineteen twenties it rebounded to seventy seven point four and i think there are a lot of factors that could affect this like are there other rival leagues that they could go to and what was the pay like et cetera nineteen thirties it fell to fifty two point five percent but still more than half of the retiring long tenured major leaguers would go on to play elsewhere professionally nineteen forties forty seven point seven percent nineteen fifties fifty point three percent percent so basically there was like a step change after the twenties into the thirties and then after the fifties it was hanging around like half of big leaguers would soldier on for a few decades and then from the fifties to the sixties steep drop off in the sixties twenty five point five percent so a quarter of them would go on and basically it's been there ever since it has hardly buddhist judged the sixties twenty five point five percent seventies twenty six percent eighties twenty five point five percent nineties twenty seven point six percent two thousand thirty point eight percent and twenty ten's twenty eight point seven percent so brandon phillips would be one of those and and it's actually about a quarter of guys which is honestly more than i would have guessed i think but yeah about a quarter of big league leaguers who don't need the money presumably at that point in most cases and have already had ten years in the bigs they don't hang it up they decide to go on so one hundred forty three of the four hundred ninety nine who retired well didn't retire but were done as big leaguers in the two thousand ten s continued to play so that's that's kind of interesting and i also asked kenny to break it down in terms of the average number of post mlb seasons so in the nineteen hundreds it was two point nine eight was the average number of post mlb seasons that these guys played in the two thousand and tens it was zero point four nine yeah so in that sense brandon phillips is unusual and even kenny also broke it down the average of all players and then the average of the ones who did play on how long did they last so in the nineteen hundreds it was three point eight additional seasons among the guys who played on on which is basically what brandon phillips did he did four more years but in the two thousand and tens even among the guys who did play on the average was one point seven additional seasons so he doubled that and and played longer and at lower levels probably than a lot of guys would have been interested in doing and another thing that i speculated about when i messaged kenny and he confirmed i think one reason why why it hasn't declined even more even though most long lasting big leaguers probably don't need to play financially speaking is that there are more options now or at least more high level remunerative professional options because they're just more international leagues yeah and maybe also fewer minor leagues or fewer affiliates and so kenny sent me a a table that breaks down where all the guys played by decade and he says more recently there has definitely been a shift the minor leagues toward independent leagues and overseas so you know now you can go to the mexican league you can go to indie ball domestically you can go to japan you can go to korea you can go to taiwan you can go other i mean other he broke down that includes cuba italy australia there's a lot right so there are many options where you can still make pretty good money and it's still high level competition and it's a a professional professional outfit so i guess that has probably bolstered the numbers somewhat in that it's a more appealing proposition even if you don't need the money quite

[A]

as much yeah that makes a lot

[B]

of sense okay so as i suspected brandon phillips was indeed an outlier but we have the numbers and the rates and everything and i will share the information that kenny shared with me and just quickly i will dispense with another question we got about this weekend from patre supporter james who noted that in the red sox orioles game this was on saturday the red sox hit a grand slam a three run homer and a two run homer all in the same inning this was of course the famous last game of alex cora just before they laid off all the hitting guys they they almost hit for the home run cycle in a single inning they just needed a solo homer to complete the one inning home run cycle and james wondered if any team has ever hit a home run cycle in the second same inning and michael mountain confirmed that no this never has happened there are one hundred and fifteen instances on record of teams hitting four or more homers in an inning dating back to nineteen thirty and all of them involved repeating an rbi count getting three out of four happens a few times a season most recently september second twenty twenty five by the guardians at fenway and they actually lost that game eleven to seven which is a a tough break and then another home run related question from sam patrion supporter who said i was thinking about joe adell's three homer robbery game and how much cooler it was than having a three homer game as a hitter and sam said that got me thinking i assume that home run robbery data is quite limited but has anyone ever had the elusive five homer game so to speak by hitting three homers and robbing two or i suppose any combination greater than four total homers and i put this to mark simon at sports info solutions and he knew the answer no one no one has hit more than two homers in a game in which they had a home run robbery since two thousand four but sis or then maybe bis kept partial track in two thousand two so they have thirty four home run robberies on record from that season covering may to august but they didn't keep track in two thousand three and so that's why they always cite the numbers since two thousand four but they do have partial data for twenty two and in the game in which mike cameron hit four homers he caught a potential grand slam against maglio right at the top of the fence and there was a newspaper account that called it a home run robbery and mark simon had mike cameron on his sports info solutions podcast and cameron confirmed that they got it right it was going to be a home run according to cameron at least he said he didn't have to jump much for it because he had long arms but he's convinced it was going to be a home run and who are we to doubt mike cameron as mark said so it did happen at least that one time i guess he hit four and he robbed one so it's a a net five homer game i guess for mike cameron all right then all right well let's take a quick break and we will be back with alex spear of the boston globe to talk more about the red sox conflagration how are you i'm okay we got so much to do today breaking balls and blakin snails and those stats won't blast themselves effectively wild effectively

[C]

wild effectively wild effectively wild effectively wild

[B]

well two months ago today today we previewed the boston red sox season and i think we may have omitted the part where they laid off almost their entire coaching staff while it was still april and so to rectify that oversight we have brought back our red sox preview guest and one of our faves alex beer of the boston globe to address why he did not predict that this would happen alex how could you fail to force your see this i'm

[C]

terrible at predictions i've told you guys this for years right like i used to you know you you know what i used to do with the little predictions with with with my half hearted efforts to predict what the red sox record would be and now i fully acknowledge the limitations of my ability to see into the future i'm i i i apologize for not having been one of the many writers who looked ahead one month into the season and envisioned the red sox sox amidst one of their worst starts in franchise history and amidst a a wrecking ball with their with their coaching staff well you did

[B]

famously nail their win total prediction a couple times back when we forced our preview guests to predict things but i would have said you were silly if you had predicted that this would happen when and how it did now i know that you were on vacation when this bloodletting occurred so that must have been interesting for you but now that you have gotten back to work and gotten back up to speed what can you tell us about why this happened in this particular way and at this

[C]

particular time i mean i guess that like desperation seems like a reasonably good explanation for things it's really interesting because i talked to craig breslow after the red sox had had a rough start to the season this was back twelve games into the season they'd gotten off to a two and eight start which was tied for the worst in franchise history they had won the next two games so they were four and eight the in at the time and at that time i asked him when when a team gets off to a poor start that defies your projections do you consider a shakeup to be you know to be a viable catalytic option and his response at that time this was about two and a half weeks ago was no we you know nothing has changed about how we view the coaching staff that got us to the postseason season last year and i think that oftentimes the decisions that you make based on those emotions in the early stages of the season have a chance to be kind of have a pretty good chance to be counterproductive and make things worse that's a lot that's changed in two and a half weeks right particularly when you consider that those two wins that the red sox just had when i had that conversation with breslow represented the start of a of a kind of improved stretch of six and three baseball then took them into to about ten days ago right like so you're probably not thinking at that time that there's going you're probably thinking that maybe the temperature check has gone down a little bit over the course of those that subsequent stretch of baseball and then bang you have essentially a really bad conclusion to to a home stand in which the red sox lost a number of games to both the tigers and to the yankees while getting shut down by pitchers like tarek skubal and premier valdez and cam schlitler yeah bunch of

[B]

scrubs there really if you can't hit

[C]

against those guys that's usually the litmus test of a hitting staff of a group of hitting coaches but it seems like this decision came together rather rapidly and the explanation by craig breslow was that we have one hundred thirty five games now by making the decision now to turn things around and get things right kind of with the somewhat implied like offer a different voice in the room but without going into any real specifics but you know i guess that the red sox had just seen you know were presumably concerned about the direction about the lack of adjustments their lineup that they were making individually collectively in the micro in the macro and decided to that extreme change was the was the most logical response but it defies what craig breslow said a couple of weeks ago and it defies the way in which the red sox who have really shied away from in season coaching staff never mind managerial changes over the last twenty plus years like this is this is very atypical behavior for the

[A]

organization well and as you're noting not just voice in the room but voices in the room right the job of a majority manager is sometimes to get fired as a way of indicating that the organization knows they have a problem and is doing something but i'm i'm struck not only by how many people were fired here the bench coach the third basin outfield coach the hitting coach the assistant hitting coach the major league hitting strategist jason veritech got reassigned if

[B]

he'll take a reassignment joe cronin died forty years ago and he got fired

[A]

but not only did they remove all of those folks i'm also struck by who remains right that the pitching coaches and coordinators have been left in place so what can you tell us about the sort of further down the line coaching firings and why the guys who are left are the ones who are

[C]

left yeah it's a fascinating one because you could very easily make the case that the pitching has been subject to greater underperformance in this early part of the season than the hitting right because the red sox had declared themselves to be a pitching and defense team and their starting rotation has been abysmal in no small part because garrett crochet has had a couple of derailment outings and ranjir suarez ended up like having a couple of derailment outings brian baio has had a couple of awful outings yeah the pitching in many respects has been the group that has underperformed more significantly craig breslow said that said that his confidence was very high in the pitching group to be able to make corrections with the pitchers who are struggling thus far so evidently he did not feel the same way about the hitting group which raises the question of why did you sign pete fatsy to a two year extension this past off season if your trust in his ability to work with the hitters was going to be this thin and there are surely a lot of behind the scenes dynamics that exist within a moment like this especially because the red sox have a very young hitting group which by the way means probably more volatile in terms of performance right like the idea of roman of like projecting roman anthony entering year two projecting marcelo meyer in year two is more difficult than it is to project someone with wilson contreras track record but at any rate you can certainly imagine and again this is just speculation not yet reporting that there are scenarios in which they wanted to have clarity of messaging along maybe one line of offensive philosophy as opposed to another it is interesting that the hitting coaches that were gone were pete fatsi who had predated craig breslow's tenure in the red sox organization as well as dylan lawson who had come on board during chaim bloom's tenure staying as john sotoropoulos who had been hired out of draft driveline during chaim blum's tenure but who was appointed to the major league coaching staff just this past off season in a that was a craig breslow front office move john sotoropoulos again is someone who cut his teeth at driveline he's very highly regarded as an instructor yeah you had the guys without the significant driveline backgrounds were the ones who ended up leaving and so you now have john sodoropoulos colin hetzler who was promoted from aaa worcester is also someone who had previously worked at driveline so maybe there is a desire for more clarity philosophical clarity about messaging when it comes to training especially the young players who are going to be an essential part of the red sox success both in the near and long term future you can certainly imagine a scenario and again this is speculative in which there was a lot of conversation about adaptive approaches to hitting versus leaning harder into some of driveline's more overarching philosophical principles although i do think that the idea of driveline as a kind of monolithic philosophy is exaggerated greatly you guys are both well familiar with some of the nuance that goes into the driveline instruction but i can imagine a scenario in which that was part of the rationale when it came to messaging and alignment and all that good stuff but nonetheless it's the hitter it's mostly people in the hitting group who took the fall yeah i

[B]

thought andrew bailey was just the designated survivor or something just to ensure the continuity of the coaching staff but it's true the starting pitching twenty seventh in fangraphs war and was projected to be best i believe coming into the season so yeah that's a pretty dramatic underperformance but so has the hitting been and maybe in a more dismaying way joshian wrote about this in his newsletter last week but it's been a break breakdown in approach and there was the concern which we talked to you on the preview pod about and you gave credence to the idea that there wasn't enough power or home run power on this team and they are tied for last in the majors in homers with the brewers and the giants and that's in fenway so that has happened although i

[C]

just want to just i just want to jump in on one quick disclaimer the that has happened in fenway fenway is a whole hellacious place to try to hit for power in april like it's a it's a brutal offensive environment at the state it doesn't look warm there it's the the the the ball flight the ball doesn't quite have as much carry as it will in in

[B]

june july august yeah but the swing decisions seem to have regressed and just the approach and and lifting balls in the air even if the balls aren't carrying that well they aren't even really putting themselves in a position to hit for power and they then you look at the young guys that this foundation supposed to be the foundation of the franchise anthony and meyer and christian campbell of course i mean these guys are not in as good a place as they were a year ago and so that maybe portends something ominous for the direction of the franchise so i guess that's why you might say we need to step into our message isn't resonating or we need a new message or whatever it is so it's it's not that huge a sample obviously and yeah i think all the questions that you raise about why now as opposed to you know it's it's tough to clean house after you make the playoffs so i guess even if there were concerns you kind of have to let it ride and go into the season it's projected to be good and then maybe do you think this is kind of these weren't breslo's guys and he inherited them and and every chief baseball officer likes to have their own people in place and so maybe he was waiting for a moment when it would be politically defensible to do this it's really

[C]

really tough to say because he had extended every one of them including alex cora who in his first year as the chief baseball officer he gave a three year extension to to cover the twenty five through twenty seven seasons and was prepared to give a five year extension cora at the time was like i don't know if i want five years i have family stuff like you know that i want to be able to i want to be flexible in my family in my family's future so let's just do three cool they find a you know they they find that middle ground multiple members of the coaching staff who were just fired had signed multi year extensions this off season so those were craig breslow decisions so it is bizarre timing to make that decision one month into the season and to decide that you're going to engage in that kind of wholesale change unless you're concerned about a rapidly deteriorating development environment you're trying to win of course but you're also trying to create an atmosphere in which young players feel comfortable in both failure in order to get to success eventually i do think that the essential nature of figuring out a productive player or development environment for a roster that is very young in which anthony and meyer and caleb durbin are all in their first full big league seasons right that's a that's a pretty tricky thing and it usually requires young hitters taking some lumps like you think back to let's say gunnar henderson having gotten a september call up looked really good then being a bad hitter but a really good defender for his first you know two to three months of his first full big league season and then becoming kind of a perennial all star mvp candidate like there's there's an arc there and on the one hand i think that that argues in favor of giving time to everyone including members of the coaching staff to figure out like you know to help them find their footing right like i i don't think that it's a fair expectation to think that if roman anthony and marcelo meyer are sort of struggling in april with certain aspects then it's a reflection on the coaching staff that that might be a reflection of their youth rather than the coaching staff on the other hand it is essential to figure out the environment in which you know making sure you have the environment in which you think that these players who are still developing in an environment and in a clubhouse and on a roster where experienced veterans are scarce like you really have to think hard and strategically about how you're supporting the young players players maybe that played into it again it's kind of all speculative at this point but you just kind of go into you just think through what the logic can be but then there's also just the extreme of like they decided that a shakeup was in order because they are in their eyes the team is massively underperforming their projections and so you know their hope is that rather than drifting through they might not have another week or two of media of bad baseball to drift through if they want to maintain their playoff hopes so clearly there was a decision made that like the need for a catalyst was immediate and urgent in a way that's very atypical right like the fact that they flew up in the middle of a series in the middle of a road trip without benefit of an off day to make this to make this decision to be make you know this saturday night you know wrecking ball to the coaching staff like that's that's wild stuff and suggests a level of of urgency that

[A]

borders on panic well we should talk about the roster as it's constructed i suppose because as you're noting more will certainly come out about sort of the the developmental aspect of this you know what was sort of the tipping point for breslow and company but craig bresla built this roster right you know you talk about the development of caleb durbin there's a reason that caleb durbin is their starter at that position and some of it has to do with the vagaries of free agency and some of it has to do with decisions that breslow made in the off season right so i'm curious sort of what you think this shakeup means for breslow's future in the organization because because if things don't get better well he's the only guy left apart from most of the pitching coaches but you know in terms of like key decision makers he sure shifted the focus to it being his club now right you know what do you think this means about sort of his long term viability with the organization

[C]

it is a great question in an organization where in an organization that hasn't had particularly long shelf lives for the for the heads of baseball operations right like it's now well established ben sherrington dave dombrowski chaim blum all ended up being dismissed in the middle of in the middle of season number four breslow is in the middle of season number three there's there's not a lot of time to waste particularly when you consider he hasn't won a world series which a couple of his predecessors and even cheyenne blum had gotten to an alcs with the twenty twenty one team so in answer to your question of what is breslow's long term future in the organization i guess that the rest of the season is going to tell us an awful lot about that because this is his organization now there are a lot of people who had been in the organization for a long time across multiple general managers and that's his players that's his coaches front office members scouts et cetera who are no longer in the organization the organization has been significant significantly remade according to the vision of craig breslow since he became the chief baseball officer in november of twenty twenty three i think he recognizes that when he was hired he was well aware of the track record of his predecessors and the longevity of them or the lack thereof so eyes wide open there and again we're kind of engaged in the speculative act of thinking about what a person's motivation but perhaps that did kind of introduce a level of urgency in terms of thinking well if i want i have this long term vision for the organization and i better get there pretty quickly the short term and long term better intersect pretty quickly because there's not a lot of time to be able to have the organization in the image and form that i wanted

[B]

what do you think about how this was received by the players because it doesn't seem to have gone over grip great you know sometimes when a coach's staff is let go a manager's let go you know rarely will a player come out and say oh good riddance glad we got rid of him but you can kind of tell whether they're happy or not and in this case it seems like most of the ire has been reserved for breslow or for management ownership and so the way that they came in and evidently talked briefly and mostly breslow although kennedy and henry were there sort of silently looming i guess for the most part but breslow they didn't really take questions from the players and the players seemed somewhat miffed about that and trevor story had some comments about how he doesn't understand the direction of the organization and then the whole coaches for hire llc debacle with the van which i mean someone should probably be fired just for that i think just get in the van with everyone else but yeah call an uber call an uber man yeah

[A]

the outcome

[B]

allegation that breslow lacks feel perhaps has has dogged him throughout his tenure so what do you think of the way the players have responded to this and also cora and the coaches who seem to be just traveling across the country taking buddy travel road movie photos of themselves with their thumbs up and cora just talking about how happy he is is that sort of a don't put in the newspaper i got mad or is it like he's actually happy to

[C]

be out here yeah it's all very bizarre right it's kind of playing out seeing the joyful pictures of being treated like kings in the north end of boston i'm reminded of watching the photos seeing the social media pictures of mike napoli smoking a cigarette and shirtless through different parts of boston after the red sox won the world series in twenty thirteen if you don't know what i'm referring to look at up kids but it's it's been super bizarre i i do think that that speaks to craig breslo craig breslo and sam kennedy described in their press conference this idea that like once they made the decision that this is what they felt they needed to do they wanted to be bold and decisive and do it immediately you know there's a part of everyone seeing how that landed in the clubhouse particularly given that hasty i i think guarantee whitlock said that breslow talked for about two minutes and that chad tracy the interim manager who by the way is super bright very talented and i think has a great future i'm honestly surprised he hadn't been hired to be part of a major league staff before this year but he talked for five minutes and that was it no q and a and i think that that raises the question of like why did you do that in the middle of a series rather than on an off day when you would have had an opportunity for a less hurried interaction with your players it does not seem like the handling of this was terribly graceful in terms of how it's being received by other parts of the organization yeah i think that your point is a fair one right like there have been questions throughout craig breslow's tenure as the chief baseball officer of the red sox about the you know the kind of operating dynamic that people are working in and i think that the way in which this news was received is doing nothing

[A]

to downplay that i'm curious sort of and again we're sort of in the realm of speculation here and i know that the story made a point of saying that you know they weren't going to hold what had happened against the folks coming in that he has familiarity with chad tracy as do several other members of the big league rock roster but what kind of dynamic has the front office set up for tracy because i mean i know they won on sunday so i guess that's good right but you're in sort of an odd spot when it comes to trying to have a a positive developmental trajectory with these guys when the last one was so unceremoniously dismissed and in a way the clubhouse isn't thrilled about yeah i

[C]

think that the thing that benefits chad tracy is that he already has because he's been the aaa manager since twenty twenty twenty two he has pretty solid relationships a pretty solid foundation with the vast majority of players on this roster many of them had excellent developmental tracks with chad tracy as their manager in aaa and as well as chad epperson who's their aa manager who also got moved up to being their interim third base coach he also got promoted to the big league staff as a kind of familiar and reassuring presence so i actually do think that it's possible for the two things to be separated right like there are i do think that the players have a lot of trust in the people who are now on the staff who have been in their minor league system for a while the interesting dynamic is going to come with regards to the hitting group which the players on the active roster do not have as much familiarity with necessarily at the top there's chad tracy chad epperson and jose flores who was already the red sox first base coach who is now going to be their interim interim bench coach but he had also been the aaa bench coach with chad tracy from twenty twenty two to twenty twenty four it's possible that they can have an atmosphere that's not a train wreck as we've sometimes seen you know early season replacements with internal candidates whether it was a guy like a brian snitker who had a lot of trust from people in the braves organization or rob thompson who had a lot of trust from people in the phillies organization at the time that he replaced joe girardi in may of twenty twenty two you can get past it but it ain't easy so i think that chad tracy was good about being upfront and acknowledging the fact that it's it's a it's a challenging circumstance to step into because he has a he had a great relationship with alex cora as well as

[B]

soon as this news broke people were alluding to the history of people in boston just getting trashed on their way out of town which is maybe not solely a boston tradition you hear that about the mets a lot too but i think there was an anticipation that oh boy the dirt that's going to come out and it's going to be flying on both sides and maybe the coaches are going to be telling their side of the story and the front office is going to be telling its side of the story so we've been couching everything we've been saying in terms of well more might come out and we don't know exactly what everyone is thinking as a longtime member of the boston media do you expect that there is going to be a lot of slinging of various stories and inside accounts and anonymous denigrating of other people's performance

[C]

well i don't know about anonymous denigrating of other people's performance so let me let me let me pick apart a couple of different elements of that first first is anytime someone is fired in a prominent position usually there is a post mortem that takes an awfully hard look at whatever like the decision making factors that go into that and that often means that you end up flagging the things that were going that had been identified as going wrong to lead to a firing of someone that's true in every market i think that there just tends to be you know because there's more media in boston than there are in some other markets although the disparity is a bit is not as exaggerated as it once was you know there tend to be more people who are kind of chasing information and identifying it right but yeah i think that there's always a postmortem with anyone losing a job unless they decide that they're just going to walk off into the sunset beyond that do i expect to there to be to be mud flinging no i would think that with time we'll be able to get to some of the key areas that craig breslow and his kind of like narrow inner circle of decision makers alongside the top level of red sox ownership felt needed to be addressed we'll probably get a little bit more in terms of what prompted the decision and why they felt so much more urgency but i don't know that it becomes ad hominem stuff i mean thinking back to the histories to the history of regime changes that i've covered when john farrell was when john when they quote unquote parted ways with john farrell after the twenty seventeen season by the way that dude managed three first place teams in a five year period in what a world series and like has never sniffed another job in uniform in baseball but and is now happy as a lobsterman i mean that literally that's that's not a euphemism he is a lobsterman off the coast of of massachusetts but when when he got let go there wasn't you know there wasn't a lot of there wasn't a lot of mudslinging and in fact it was only a couple years after his departure that that i was able to un earth kind of the significant and complete fraying of his relationship with dave dombrowski that had played a significant role in the player development environment and making it a hard one for the red sox in twenty seventeen it wasn't until twenty nineteen that i was able to publish that i don't think that this history of mudsling is quite as extensive as is sometimes portrayed but it is the case that you usually firings aren't exactly happy events and so there does tend to be some effort on the side of either those who are doing the firing or those who are fired to give more illumination as to why they think it was a good or a bad decision and that can take a number of forms and i expect that we'll find more i expect that we'll be introduced to more information in the coming days what is your

[A]

sense and i'm sorry to keep asking you questions that you do have to speculate on but you noted that there's sort of in addition to it not having been very much of the season although a notable stretch because it's the only one we have so far this is a roster with a lot of young hitters who might have developmental work yet to do whose performance might be more prone to fluctuation and variance as they continue to adjust to the big league level given that that is operating in the background here and then you also have just the reality of wins and losses how do you imagine they are going to as an organization and sort of assess the success of these moves because you you might imagine that a team with this much underlying talent might just start winning anyway independent of any sort of personnel decisions made on the coaching staff simply winning doesn't necessarily mean that you know this group is say worthy of having interim tags removed and what have you them continuing to lose might speak to continued developmental needs but it might not say anything about this staff so how do you think they're going to assess like oh we've we've done the right thing here we've we've sort of righted the ship it's

[C]

a great question and one that i think it's sort of the you'll you'll know it when you see it maybe i do think that i think that they are a kind of like kpi like you know business you know business world speak driven organization that does believe in identifying progress based on you know identify areas that need to be improved and on an individual level and then seeing if those areas improve and if they are largely improving then you know then off they go and if and if not then maybe it's not the then maybe you determine it's not the right group but i do think that ultimately a lot of this is going to be just that craig breslow said this yesterday ultimately it's wins and losses and you know he he said that he said that the expectations for this group remain unadjusted from where they were entering the season when they had described this as being a team that they viewed as being projecting as a playoff contending world series aspirant so i do think that both in terms of breslow's decision making and in terms of the work being done with the group if they're winning and if they're showing improvement and i'm talking about top line improvement in addition to like more micro stuff related to individual players chase rates or the degree to which x player is improving his discipline his swing decisions on breaking balls or y player is improving his in game base running decisions i think that all of that will end up being taken into account but at the highest level it's all about improvement and seeing a lot of it in a pretty short period of time and

[B]

i guess really the only constant in this red sox era i mean going back decades at this point is just incredible variation from year to year and unpredictability it's just neil payne has written about this and has shown just very two teams if any have just had as variable results from season to season as the red sox and often it's when you think they're up that's when they're down and vice versa it's like they just go from last place to winning a world series to last place again and you just never know and i thought that they had a solid off season and i thought that they were a good team and that this would be a a good exciting season for them so they have confounded defied expectations yet again so do you think this is just pure randomness or is this sort of a there's something rotten in the state of the red sox kind of situation because i know a lot of red sox fans have that thought that oh john henry isn't invested in the team the way he used to be figuratively and literally and the payroll is is not top ten and that's where they always were very close to the top and maybe it's just you know fenway sports group is interested in other holdings and franchises and so maybe the the problem starts at the top do you think that there's something to that that the wrong people were let go or that there's some sort of pervasive issue here because it just seems seems like fans feel that way going back to the mookie trade and all of the other exoduses to what

[C]

you said the variation from kind of projections has long predates questions about the about how much they were willing to spend right so that's true you know i do think that there's there's going to be you know part of this is the fact that they were putting a lot on the shoulders of very young players and they have been for a couple of years like they they they went essentially through a rebuild under high and bloom while last year they thought they had come to the other side of that rebuild they viewed themselves as being on the other side of it with very young players who are who are vulnerable to performance volatility i do think that just in my experience of being around the red sox i do think that the big league development environment in boston can be very challenging in ways that it isn't necessarily in some other markets where there is perhaps more permissiveness for failure or for at least struggle in that transitional period to the big leagues yeah i think that young players take it very very hard when they're struggling in boston in ways that they can swallow them i've witnessed this before in twenty fourteen when that front office group under ben cherrington and mike hazen was really very introspective throughout that year and kind of reached the conclusion that they had done a disservice to their entire roster by not putting more veteran scaffolding around their young players and what they had asked the young players to do was pretty unfair i do wonder whether or not we're seeing maybe alex bregman was the jenga piece that knocked over the tower it was striking to me to to be around the wbc at the end when roman anthony was talking very explicitly about like how much he like how yes of course he wished that that alex bregman had been back with the red sox this year and like how amazing it was that like he had been able to talk about his swing with bregman again while they were at the wbc together but that now that you know that's not what had happened so now they had to move forward and i was like wow i i didn't expect quite that much candor about about the kind of you know the the ache that the void would leave so there might be some of that where the performance volatility that goes into building around a young group is made even greater by the expectations and pressures of of a market like boston particularly one with a self declared expectation of of competing for for championships but you know that might also be bs but you know it is the case that there's been there have been feedback loops in other seasons that have led the red sox further and further away from projections bobby valentine having been one of those feedback loops things get weird in boston quickly when things start going badly so so perhaps the red sox were willing this time mindful maybe mindful of that history they were willing to do something that they they hadn't been willing to do in the past which is make an extreme course correction as opposed to in the past when they just thought that it was dangerous to introduce another variable to young players who are already dealing with so many of them and lastly

[B]

i think ken rosenthal suggested that alex cora might not be out of work long that as soon as there's another vacancy that maybe the phillies for instance who are struggling to an even greater degree than the red sox maybe he could just waltz in and take over there is your sense of cora's reputation around the game that he will be much in demand next time there's a

[C]

vacancy yeah i would i would think that a lot of people will be reaching out to alex cora if they have if they have openings yeah i you know i think that he he still has a very strong reputation particularly for for a win now club i do think that it's fair to wonder to step back and look broadly at korra's track record as a developer and to wonder is he a good developmental manager or is he really good for more veteran players where you have more clarity about what their strengths and weaknesses are yeah i i think that if if there's a win now organization he he will enjoy a lot of consideration from from those from those teams because because he's won and not a lot of people can say that well alex

[B]

sper is not a stiff he is the furthest thing from it and we are always happy to have him on the podcast nice to have you on not on a preview pod i mean not nice maybe for the red sox but nice that we had the opportunity to to chat between previews at least and now that you're back at work we look forward to your output yeah

[C]

well i i i i'm very grateful for that but like perhaps this is our great lesson that like i am useless at previewing anything and and i should merely join you for ex post facto analysis of what's happened and yeah i'm i'm nonetheless delighted for the opportunity to be able to chat with you guys as ever we can just skip

[B]

the future red sox previews and we'll just have a a postmortem at the end of the season or a month

[A]

in as the case performance reviews monthly

[C]

monthly performance reviews that's exactly that's that's become the replacement all right a few

[B]

quick follow ups one email from listener west in alabama who responded to our discussion of j richie and the first pitch homer he allowed in his big league career last week this was on episode twenty four west says you have probably gotten this from other braves fans who were watching j richie's big league debut but the braves probably went to go get the ball because j r's dad mentioned in an in game interview on braves vision wanting junior to have the ball as a reminder of what it takes to be a big leaguer huge baseball coach vibes off of him though i guess that's not so different from what megan i said so maybe we were giving off huge baseball coach vibes too i'm never not going to think of j r richard when i hear or see jr are richie even though it's spelled differently also i mentioned last week the pursuit of the sub two hour marathon and how big a role shoes were playing in that well as you may have seen this past weekend a pair of distance runners each wearing a pair of shoes very important shoes became the first officially to break the two hour marathon barrier and they were wearing the adidas adi zero adios pro evo three shoes so the shoe race in actual races continued and it's kind of funny because nike sort of jump started the shoe revolution about a decade ago with its carbon fiber running shoes the breaking two project and then nike didn't even produce the shoes that helped these athletes achieve this record but yeah these guys came in under two hours by thirty seconds or less so with that kind of margin the shoes might make the difference also got a couple email responses to our brief discussion at the start of our preceding pod about the home run brad lydge allowed to albert pujols in two thousand five and how i think it's almost too synonymous with lidge it's often the first thing that people think of when they think about brad lid but the home run wasn't as costly as a lot of other playoff pantheon homers because lid's team the astros won that series over the cardinals well listener jay wrote in to say you mentioned that pu holes's two thousand five playoff homer off of lid has probably gotten too much attention given that the astros went on to win the playoff series even though i am a cardinals fan i agree however i must respectfully disagree with your explanation via michael bauman you slash bowman said people remember this because people assume this happened in two thousand four when the cardinals beat the astros in the playoffs i'm not sure that explains it as someone who is quite a bit older a him than you or bauman or meg i remember the nineteen seventy five world series from which it seems to me the most common image that still persists is the home run by carlton fisk but this came in game six of that series and the reds went on to win it in game seven a very similar scenario and nobody will confuse the nineteen seventy five carlton fisk red sox with the closest championship red sox team the two thousand four curse bus busting gang i don't have a good theory to replace the fan confusion one here is the best i can do it's the optics which sports editors are keen to latch onto the image of fisk jumping his way down the line while trying to wave the ball fare is a great visual similarly there is something compelling about the image of lidge and pujols both watching the flight of the ball with pujols holding his bat like a muscular lumberjack who has just felled an oak tree with a handsaw while walking off to take the down another but then i'm a cardinals fan so i like that image yes i do think that's part of it that's certainly part of it with fisk's wave off the body language and it just barely staying fair and as i noted pujols's homer was an absolute tank he crushed that thing it was a hanger but nonetheless so that's part of it but i don't think that's all of it and listener matt gets at something else important here he says everything that follows is in the spirit of pedantic baseball discussion i'd push back slightly on the theory you and bauman propose that the moment's iconic status depends on people misremembering the context i think it's remembered because it was packed with drama and felt monumental in the moment for me and i'm sure for many others the accurate context including the fact that the cardinals ultimately lost the series and houston went to the world series is what makes it iconic lid was an exceptional closer and had dominated saint louis for a long stretch that night the astros were at home up three to one in the nlcs leading four to two in the ninth of a potentially decisive game five they were one out away from their first world cup series appearance with lid on the mound houston's victory felt almost inevitable then albert pujols came to bat and crushed that slider even though houston won game six that should not diminish pujols's feet in the moment that swing was electric pujols dramatically beat a worthy foe to me this is more a pujols moment than a lynch moment lid was an excellent pitcher and of course later had his well deserved world series win but on that night pujols finally beat him and in an emphatic way to me that is what made it to so iconic and as i wrote and as i'll say that's all reasonable and i agree to be clear i believe it was a big moment and it should be remembered as such i just think it looms a tad too large in l's legacy given that it didn't cost his team the series and that overall he had excellent postseason stats so i hate for the memory of october brad lydge to be tarnished by that one dinger hey mariano rivera gave up some pretty big postseason hits too so that's all i'm saying it was a big dinger to be sure i just think it has a somewhat outsized status in lid's legacy and matt agree with that much reminder that you can register for the effectively wild meetup tool if you're interested in going to a game in your area with other effectively wild listeners john joyce who created the site has improved it added some additional leagues including summer college leagues so it now supports two hundred sixty four stadia i will link to the site once again on the show page and the password is ew two thousand twenty six you can support the podcast by going to patreon dot com effectivelywild and signing up to pledge some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going help us stay ad free and get yourself access to some perks as have the following five listeners marcus ribara nick potter brent andrew rabin and dan heiser thanks to all of you patreon perks include access to a full weekly patreon exclusive episode a monthly bonus episode exclusive live streams our patrons only discord group personalized messages prioritized email answers shout outs at the end of episodes potential podcast appearances fangirls memberships and more check out all the offerings at patreon dot com effectivelywild if you are a patreon supporter you can message us through the patreon site if not you can contact us via email send your questions comments intro and outro themes to podcast dot com youm can rate review and subscribe to effectively wild on apple podcasts spotify youtube music and other podcast platforms you can join our facebook group at facebook dot com group effectivelywild you can find the effectively wild subreddit at rc effectively wild and you can check the show notes in the podcast post at fangraphs or patreon or the episode description in your podcast app for links to the stories and stats we cited today thanks to shane mckeon for his editing and production assistance we will be back with another episode soon talk to you a little later this week baseball

[A]

is a simulation it's all just one big math equation you're all about these steps as we've compiled cause you listen

[B]

to effectively wild with ben lindbergh and mac rowley come for the ball banter's

[A]

free baseball is a simulation it's all just one big conversation

[B]

effectively wild