…………………………………………………………No. No, it was not a success. Of course it wasn’t.
Was the comeback we saw in late June and July incredible? For sure. It gave me something to believe in again heading into the dog days of summer, and I’m thankful for that. The guys in that clubhouse deserve the respect they got for not lying down and for clawing their way back into the picture. I think it’s a big win for the clubhouse culture of a franchise that had been starved of that sense of culture for a while.
Last time I checked, though, they don’t hang banners for improved culture and for fighting back in the face of adversity. They don’t give out rings for great summers in this league.
It’s real simple: This is Boston, and in a season like this where you were looking to build upon your first playoff appearance in a few seasons, another Wild Card exit cannot possibly be considered a success. I think the future can be bright for this franchise, but a season ending in a second straight elimination at the hands of the Yankees early in the playoffs (before the calendar year even flipped over to October, technically!) should never ever ever ever ever be considered a success for the Red Sox.
— Fitzy Mo Peña
HELL NO!!! If you string together the last four games played against the Yankees (the two in the Wild Card series and the two at the end of August with the head-to-head tiebreaker on the line), Boston got annihilated by a combined score of 43-5. This was a season bookended by unmitigated disasters, and nothing — not even the best 37 game stretch in franchise history sandwiched in-between — can change that.
But it actually gets even worse when you zoom out. Not only did this season end in calamity, but the year as a whole gave us pretty terrible news on the array of critical building blocks the team has moving forward. Garrett Crochet and Roman Anthony have legit and potentially long-term injury concerns surrounding them. Marcelo Mayer flamed out and got flipped for a middle reliever. Kristian Campbell never found his was back from Worcester. Tristian Casas hasn’t played in over 300 games. Connelly Early was swapped for a largely unproven Curtis Mead. Brayan Bello continues to prove he’s completely untrustworthy in a pressure packed spot. Jarren Duran’s value shriveled so much you’re not going to get anything useful for him in a trade going forward. And Anthony Eyanson, Kyson Witherspoon, Enddy Azocar, and Harold Rivas were all shipped to Baltimore in exchange for Adley Rutschman, who has just one year of control left.
Do you see what’s happening here? The wave of young talent that was supposed to set up a run of many October nights at Fenway over the next handful of years has taken a massive hit over the last seven months, and we really have nothing to show for it. It’s not just 2026 that failed, but also the fact that many of the season’s worst elements threaten to linger into 2027 and beyond.
—Matthew Gross
This is going to be unpopular but, yes, this was a successful season. While the goal to some extent every year is to win the World Series, only one team can do that. Thirty teams each play 162 games, minimum, every year. Half of the comments on this site called for a fire sale in May. The big media evaluators called for gutting the roster by June for draft position. But it’s a long season. And, yes, some seasons will be bad. 2014 and 2015 were a huge drop off from the miracle in 2013. The 2019 season was a crash from 2018. If the team had kept losing through the deadline, sure, make some moves. But that’s the time to evaluate. Not May. That’s “fire a coach” or “replace the manager” time (mainly because these positions are easier to move than players).
Pace is not prophecy. We got to enjoy one of the best runs any team has ever gone on in baseball history. Without Garrett Crochet. Without (pretty much) Roman Anthony. The same people cheering Tolle for giving a hug would be calling him unserious if they’d lost 120 games.
Three players are near locks for Gold Gloves. Caleb Durbin showed everyone you can play with only 4 fingers sometimes. Payton Tolle had fun that was contagious. Wilyer Abreu and Willson Contreras rallied around their homeland with homers. The Scots visited and brought a new energy to the oldest ballpark in the league. Don’t throw away a season because there wasn’t a trophy.
—Mike Carlucci
No. My answer might have been different if the Sox had put up any kind of a fight against the Yankees in the Wild Card.
—Maura McGurk
No. Thinking back to a few weeks ago, I asked for our Question of the Day: “What would make this Red Sox season a success?” I was stunned by the number of responses who felt that it was already a success by making the playoffs. As I stated then, “It’s been five years since the Red Sox won a playoff series, and expectations need to be higher around here.”
And that was before the team was swept and embarrassed over two nights in the Bronx, not even making it to the first day of October. When there should have been urgency in a four-game series in New York in late August, with the chance to host the Yankees in the playoffs, the team got run out of the building. In the playoffs, the same thing happened.
Watching the remainder of the playoffs these past couple of weeks, what has stuck with me is how far away the Red Sox appear to be from hanging with these teams in a playoff environment. From putting the ball in play against high velocity, to hitting for power, to first-year players stepping in and appearing to be ready for the moment.
As memorable as the one-quarter of the season was for all of us, if you turn the clocks back to March and were told “Two fewer wins than last year, another five seed, and a sweep from the Yankees by the combined score of 18-2,” I can’t think of how I could have spun that as a success.
—Bob Osgood
Yes. I believe the team is in a better position than it was when the season started, which you can only do for so long before things begin to break right at the right times. That’s to say nothing of the team’s utterly iconic summer, which turned the narrative about the entire franchise 180 degrees on its axis back to pointed straight forward, where the arrow remains today. Losing two games in October by 10 billion runs doesn’t change that.
The Sox should enter next year having taken no steps backward, which is a lot harder to do than it sounds. Be happy about what we have; don’t mourn what we don’t. The dynasty was never going to last forever. This is what the climb looks and feels like. We may be hungry, but as Taylor Swift said, you’re starved until you’re not. As long as we get closer to the feast, and I believe we did, I’m happy about it.
— Bryan Joiner