All the publicly available data said Sonny Gray should have stayed in the game. So why did Boston Red Sox manager Chad Tracy take him out? That was the question dominating chatter in Boston and beyond on Wednesday, Sept. 30, when the New York Yankees completed a sweep of the Red Sox in their best-of-three American League wild-card series.
Tracy removed Gray, his veteran starting pitcher, with two outs in the fifth inning of Game 2. Two runners were on base, with Boston trying to keep its deficit at 1-0. With left-handed reliever Erik Miller on the mound, the next batter, Cody Bellinger, singled to drive in a run and give the Yankees a 2-0 lead.
Analytics — the application of quantitative data to managers' and executives' decision-making — has been around long enough in baseball that the wisdom of removing Gray for a relief pitcher is conventional. The Yankees had just turned their lineup over. Bellinger, a left-handed hitter, was about to face the right-handed Gray for the third time in the game in a critical situation.
Yet the analytics didn't support the decision to take Gray out. More news: CC Sabathia Predicts Yankees Game 1 ALDS Starter After Eliminating Red Sox Gray's curveball and sinker had been quality pitches for him all game, according to advanced Quality of Pitch data. Gray had already thrown Bellinger those exact pitches in June; they resulted in three swinging strikes and a foul tip.
And the third time through the order has seen Gray at his best in 2026: his third-time-through xwOBA was .231, better than it was during either of his first two trips through the opposing team's lineup. In other words, this was a classic case of the data telling a manager to keep his starting pitcher on the mound. If anything, Tracy had to go against the available analytics to take the ball from Gray.
More news: Devastating Roman Anthony Injury Update Dooms Red Sox’s Chances vs Yankees “We're trailing. We're struggling to score runs,” Tracy said after the game. Nonetheless, there were multiple examples of day-after analysis bemoaning Tracy's stubborn reliance on analytics — and, more generally, what some in the media reported as the outsized influence of Driveline, which consulted the Red Sox on R&D initiatives until earlier this year.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
