The Red Sox season is over. But Red Sox injury news never stops! At least this is good-ish news: Mickey Gasper underwent successful “distal biceps tendon repair” surgery yesterday to fix his gnarly looking arm:
It’s expected that it will take 4-6 months for Gasper to get back into game action, so it’s unclear whether he’ll be ready for Opening Day 2027. Of course it’s also unclear if baseball itself will be ready for Opening Day 2027… (Chris Cotillo, MassLive)
But before we can look to the future, we must reckon with the past. In this case, we’re still done talking about the fact that Sonny Gray sure did seem pissed about being taken out of Game 2 after only 70 pitches. Is this something that’s going to cause long-term issues between players and management? According to one scribe, there were “traces of betrayal” in the visitor’s clubhouse following the game. “The failure to recognize and honor [Sonny Gray’s] ability in the middle of the biggest game of the year had to feel like a show of disrespect — not just to Gray, but also, many of his teammates.” (Sean McAdam, MassLive)
McAdam’s story is more unsourced speculation than anything else — I mean, what exactly does he mean by “traces of betrayal?” But he’s not the only one making similar insinuations. “I think a lot of their leadership stuff got masked because they went on that massive run,” former player and current broadcaster/podcaster Anthony Rizzo said. “I just feel like there’s so much kind of [expletive] that happened in Boston this year… and now that you don’t win, this is when it all comes out under the hood.” (Kayley Brown, Boston.com)
But these supposed issues don’t seem to be making ownership second-guess the decision to extend Craig Breslow. “Something we’ve been striving for is baseball operations continuity and stability. I know that sounds a little odd, given that we made a change with the manager and coaching staff. The hallmark of a good baseball organization is continuity, No. 1, at the ownership level. But with your baseball operation, we haven’t had that for some time. So we wanted to do that, we were proactive with that, and we informed him midseason that we were picking up the option. There was no contractual need to do it, no mechanism. There was nothing that had to be done. We wanted to do that as a demonstration of commitment to stability and continuity.” (Alex Speier, Boston Globe)
The executives in the commissioner’s office are probably pretty happy about things right now, too. That’s because the Red Sox-Yankees series did some pretty good numbers. “Tuesday’s Game 1 averaged 7.3 million viewers across NBC and Peacock, making it the most-watched opener of an MLB Wild Card or Division Series since 2006,.” (Chris Spiering, ClutchPoints)
