Did Brock Holt reveal a shocking reason for Hanley Ramirez’s Red Sox exit?

When the Boston Red Sox suddenly designated Hanley Ramirez for assignment on May 25, 2018, the timing wasn’t necessarily suspicious. Ramirez had gone 0-for-4 with three strikeouts the night before in Tampa Bay. He was 0-for-his-last-20 and doing little to intimidate opponents as the team’s designated hitter.

Ramirez was also in the final year of a four-year, $88 million contract. By cutting him, the Red Sox effectively agreed to pay Ramirez all but a pro-rated portion of the major league minimum salary — $545,000 at the time. Yet no team picked him up.

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Brock Holt might have offered the reason why.

Holt was Ramirez’s teammate on the 2018 Red Sox, who posted the best regular-season record in Major League Baseball, then defeated the Los Angeles Dodgers in a five-game World Series.

In a new appearance on the Section 10 podcast, Holt related the story of a teammate who was released in the middle of the 2018 season for a very dark reason.

“We were in Tampa, and we were stretching before BP,” Holt said. “And we were all in a circle, having a good old time, just stretching getting ready for a Major League Baseball game. This someone looks around at all of us and says, ‘you know what? I’m going to bring a gun to the field tomorrow and kill all of you.’

“And then he looks straight at me and he says, ‘and you’re gonna be first.’ And I was like, dude, I know you’re probably joking, but you can’t say that.”

Holt suggested that word of threat spread to the team’s front office.

“Our strength coach at the time was like, ‘dude, I’ve got to tell (Dave) Dombrowski, (the Red Sox general manager at the time) and I’m like, please do because I’m the first one that’s gonna go,” Holt said.

Only one player on the Red Sox’s major league roster was released in the middle of a series in Tampa during the 2025 regular season: Ramirez.

After playing briefly for Cleveland in 2019, Ramirez retired with a clean reputation. He never was disciplined by Major League Baseball. He was suspended by his team only once, in 2003, when he made an obscene gesture toward a fan as a minor leaguer in the Red Sox system.

Otherwise, any mention of Ramirez and guns was relegated to the swamp of Twitter rumors. Holt’s anecdote is the first public story of its kind involving Ramirez. It suggests there was more to Ramirez’s sudden exit from Boston than his struggles at the plate.

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