On Tuesday, Sonny Gray greeted Red Sox Nation with exactly what it wanted to hear. Here’s the money quote:
“It feels good to me to be able to go to a place now where it’s easy to hate the Yankees.”
Not only is the quote bellicose, but the delivery leaves little room for epexegesis:
Now of course, there’s one school of thought that he’s just pandering to his new audience, and perhaps that’s true. But there’s also a pretty established history of Gray not being too pleased with his time in New York. This is particularly apparent when diving into the pitching style Larry Rothschild and the Yankees wanted to push on him during his disastrous season there. One of my favorite nuggets regarding that comes from this Fangraphs interview back in 2023 when Gray said “I don’t think everyone had it together that everyone’s four-seam is different.” This was in response to the idea they wanted him to work up in the zone when his spinning four-seam had more success down in the zone.
But Gray’s gossip only gets more interesting when you start pairing it with things other Red Sox pitchers have said recently. Just this week, Payton Tolle quipped “it’s good to have somebody that’s like–minded,” when he was asked about Gray’s comments.
Also, in that same linked article from Mass Live, Connor Wong added this: “I think growing up for me personally, I wasn’t a huge fan of theirs, so I love that out of him and very excited to have him.”
Then on Tuesday night, we added more fuel to the fire when OTM’s own Pod On Lansdowne crew did their first interview with a player on the 40-man roster. Here, we got a couple of nuggets on why David Sandlin doesn’t like the Yankees.
And of course, all this is riding on the back of Hunter Dobbins’ comments from last June when he dropped this gem:
“I’ve said it before, if the Yankees were the last team to give me a contract, I’d retire.”
Dobbins then went on Foul Territory and doubled down on those remarks.
So now we have four different pitchers in Gray, Tolle, Sandlin and Dobbins who have all either made their MLB debut or been added to the Red Sox 40-man roster in the last eight months and have gone out of their way to express something between dislike and disdain for the Yankees. Either media coaches are now flat out telling guys to dump on New York because it plays with fans, or the Red Sox have a legitimate core of pitches who hate the Yankees.
With this pattern developing, now’s a good time to check in on the 2026 schedule and find the 13 dates where the Red Sox and Yankees match up. Here’s what that looks like:
You might want to mark those dates down on your calendar. If there’s any truth behind all these words, there could be some serious fireworks.
