NEW YORK – With memories of a difficult time in his baseball career and questions about his future converging at Yankee Stadium this week, Sonny Gray is doing his best to live in the moment.

“I feel good,” the 14-year MLB veteran right-hander said on Tuesday afternoon, hours before his Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees played Game 1 of the American League Wild Card round. “I think the atmosphere will be a high-level, high-energy, intense playoff atmosphere. Which, as a player, that’s what – as a player that’s played for a while, who’s been around, that’s what you want, right?

“For me, that’s what keeps you wanting to continue to come back and play. So yeah, I’m excited. Not trying to look too far ahead.”

Gray, who will start Game 2 for the Red Sox, knows he won’t receive a friendly reception from Yankees fans, given that he is not only wearing the uniform of the enemy, but that his time in the Bronx was far less successful. The Yankees acquired him from the Oakland Athletics at the 2017 trade deadline, and traded him to the Cincinnati Reds after the 2018 season. The pinstriped period of his career amounted to a 4.51 ERA over 41 games, including 34 starts. His struggles in ‘18 were such that the Yankees demoted him to the bullpen late in the regular season, and left him off their postseason roster.

It’s a far cry from the regular-season campaign Gray just put together for the Red Sox at 36 years old. He pitched to a 2.72 ERA, one point better than his previous career-best for a full season in 2015, over 29 starts, with an AL-best .783 win-loss percentage, and MLB-leading and career-high 18 wins.

Gray also immediately endeared himself to Red Sox fans and reignited Yankees fans’ furor when, in his first Boston media availability after the trade from the St. Louis Cardinals, he said, “I never wanted to go (to the Yankees) in the first place … it feels good to go to a place now where, you know what, it’s easy to hate the Yankees.”

But on Monday, Gray took a more positive view of his time in New York.

“There’s a snowball that kind of starts rolling down a hill, and if you don’t ever stop it, then the snowball just gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and it picks up traction … the bigger the snowball gets, the harder it is to stop it or to take a step back,” he metaphorized. “It just took me to get away and get myself into a different environment, and then reflect on those things, right? … And that took some time, but I do know that playing here made me a stronger person, made me a better man, a better husband.

“Ultimately, it made me a better pitcher, a better baseball player, and that’s kind of what I take from my time here.”

Gray is in the final season of the three-year, $75 million contract he signed with the Cardinals ahead of the 2024 season. He waived his no-trade clause to come to Boston last offseason, hoping to join a team that could make a deep playoff run and finally get him a World Series ring.

“Getting to the playoffs, being on a winning team, things that I was looking for when I did decide to waive my no-trade from St. Louis,” Gray said. “I’d seen what Boston had done the previous year. I had seen the young talent and the direction, and just the organization as a whole is just a winning organization, a winning place, a winning culture. And it took us a little bit this year to get back to that, but then we got back to that, and here we are.”

“I want to win, I like to win,” Gray continued. “You’ve heard me say this over and over and over this whole year, is just win, win everything you do, is to win the game. And yeah, I’ve really enjoyed my time in Boston, I really have. My family’s enjoyed it. It’s been a great place for us.”

Whether Gray wants to stay in Boston, or even continue pitching, remains to be seen, though. His contract includes a $30 million mutual option for 2027, or a $10 million buyout. But he has also made it clear that if his family wants him to come home, he will retire.

“I’m going to take today for today, take tomorrow for tomorrow,” Gray said, “and then go from there.”