Chad Tracy is in the middle of a baseball life, 20 years of playing, managing and teaching in the minor leagues behind him, developing the baseball mind he inherited from his father, Jim, a former big-league player and manager. The best years are ahead of him.
When the Red Sox fired Alex Cora in April, a move that enraged fans who saw the blame for the miserable start lying elsewhere, Tracy, 41, came from Worcester, the organization’s Triple A affiliate he’d been managing since 2021. He slipped into the manager’s office at Fenway Park rather quietly.
“You’re following Alex, who’s a great manager, somebody I have a ton to respect for,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said Friday, as the Red Sox arrived in New York to start the critical series going on all weekend. “That wasn’t an easy moment to walk in. You can’t argue with the way they’ve played.”
Tracy walked in without grandiose pronouncements or grand plans to reinvent the Red Sox or baseball. As a baseball lifer knows, a manager’s job is not to make his team something it is not, but to unlock the talent it has.
“When I first got here, it was ‘Get here and put eyes on it,’” Tracy said in the visitors’ dugout at Yankee Stadium before his team lost the opener to the Yankees, 1-0. “I know a lot of the guys, so I had a good idea about a lot of players, but just get eyes on it, let ’em play. Let me calm them down, calm things down and let them play and then make my observations and go from there.
“Kicking the door down and saying what we’re going to do, A, B and C, when you haven’t even watched a game live in person, that’s not the way to handle it. We made our observations the first few weeks and started chipping away at stuff.”
Yankees manager Aaron Boone: Credit where it is due. (Associated Press)
Chipping away is an understatement. The Red Sox were 10-17 when Tracy took over on April 25, and bottomed out at 32-46 when they started the four-game sweep of the Yankees at Fenway on June 25. They won 15 in a row, 32 of 37 games before cooling off a tad and on Friday, they began the series in New York 73-60, in firm control of a wild card playoff spot, and looking to overtake the Yankees for the chance to host a first round-series. That would be huge, with the two ancient and bitter rivals sandwiching our state and dominating our baseball culture most very likely to match up in such a series, as they did last year.
The teams split their doubleheader on Saturday, so the season series is tied at 6-6 and the tiebreaker will be determined Sunday.
What Tracy did, in his understated way, and Boone in his underappreciated way, was to give Connecticut a summer, reviving the rivalry. That summer of following along is about gone now, and it has left the Red Sox and Yankees poised to give us a September and an October, too. Buckle up, The Rivalry is Back on, and in a big way.
Boone, in his eighth season with the Yankees and more than 200 games above .500, is underappreciated, his optimistic statements mocked, because he has had too many rough, lost Octobers while laboring for a fan base convinced that World Series can and should be won every year — oblivious to the structural changes in baseball that made that kind of thing do-able for the Yankees of the 20th Century, but not since.
Boston Red Sox pitcher Ranger Suarez, center, heads to the dugout while being pulled by interim manager Chad Tracy, left, during the sixth inning of a baseball game against the Philadelphia Phillies, Thursday, May 14, 2026, in Boston. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)
The Yankees were 18 games over .500 when they got to Boston on the 25th of June, and while they have treaded water since, treading water with Aaron Judge, Giancarlo Stanton, Cody Bellinger, Max Fried, Garret Cole and Carlos Rodon all out for big stretches, sometimes all at once, has taken some deft managing, Boone has used his bullpen to bring home countless close, low-scoring wins, like Friday, to keep the Yankees in the lead wild-card spot and within reach of first-place Tampa Bay in the AL East as September begins this week.
It’s not the first time Boone has skillfully prevented a season from slipping away, but he will always be dogged by the outmoded “Yankees-are-supposed-to-win” mentality surrounding his clubhouse.
Meanwhile Tracy has been working a baseball miracle, as the Red Sox, too, have had to overcome key injuries, hoping to get Roman Anthony, Trevor Story and some pitching back soon. In the meantime, he’s galvanized a team, with one horrible night trapped on a plane in early July bringing relatively obscure players together, with largely forgotten prospects, like third baseman Caleb Durbin, who was in the Yankees’ system a few years ago.
“With the injuries we had, when you’re tapping that far into your depth, people will say, ‘That’s gonna fall apart,’” Tracy said. “We tapped pretty far into our depth and we showed we had some guys down in Triple A that are pretty good players, who can play and are not afraid of this environment.”
Dom Amore’s Sunday Read: CT native brings home Cup full of memories; UConn’s Red-letter day and more
The Red Sox brought in several new coaches with Tracy, and the hitting philosophy changed. As Boone pointed out, the current Boston lineup can score runs in different ways, small ball to stealing to slugging.
“There were a lot of things going well,” Tracy said. “That’s what gets lost in all of this. In spite of the record, there was still a lot of things going well. Our starting pitching was performing exceptionally well, our bullpen was doing an amazing job, we just couldn’t get to it as much as we wanted to. We had to do some things better offensively.
“The dynamic of the offense changed, our swing decisions, what we were swinging at, the grindy-ness of the at-bats, drawing walks, swinging at better pitches, that’s what changed and we went from a team that was having trouble scoring runs to a team that scores the most runs. For me, the offensive identity is what flipped the most.”
Tracy is still technically the “interim” manager. If the Red Sox were planning for him to be merely a placeholder, those plans are going to have to change. For Boone, however this season turns out, it will probably not be good enough for the city that never sleeps, or is ever satisfied. As long as baseball is played, managers will get too much credit, too much blame — this, they sign on for — but where we sit we should be able to appreciate, albeit grudgingly, that these guys gave us something in 2026.
They’ve given us a baseball season worth sinking our teeth into, with tense games like Friday in which every pitch, every at-bat, every move in the field, on the bases and from the dugout, will matter.
More for your Sunday Read:
Sunday short takes
*Lou Iannotti of North Haven, who played at Quinnipiac and comes from a family of New Haven-area hitters, is in his second season as the Blue Jays’ assistant hitting coach, and he’s earned respect in that clubhouse. “He’s been huge, he knows how to connect with us,” Toronto star and Connecticut’s own George Springer said. “He knows, individually, how certain guys work. He cares. And he cares to the point it keeps him up at night, then he’s always got something for you, trying to figure out a way to make you better.
“As a player to know you have hitting coaches who are in the trenches with you individually and us as a team is awesome.”
Iannotti was picked out of a chirping Jays bench on Aug. 20 and ejected for arguing a check-swing call that went against Springer, the former UConn star.
*New Haven opened its football season with a 22-21 win over Marist Friday, and Nate Burleson II caught two passes for 78 yards and a TD. Burleson and his brother, edge rusher Nehemiah, are the sons of former NFL player and current TV personality, CBS Mornings host Nate Burleson. They transferred from Nevada, their parents’ alma mater.
*Marshall Butler, an All-Stater at Middletown High, is beginning his senior season with the D-II Saint Michael’s men’s soccer team. Butler has five goals and three assists in his career, and made the Northeast 10 Conference’s academic honor role last spring, figures to play a bigger role at forward this season. … His parents, Kevin and Carleen Roy-Butler met while they were student-athletes at Saint Michael’s in the mid-1990s.
*Keep an eye on Trinity College wide receiver Nolan O’Brien. Though only 5 feet 9, he has a knack and there are agents out there who think he can be that rarity, an NFL prospect out of Division III. The Bantams open their season on Sept. 19 against Colby.
Dom Amore’s Sunday Read: Meet SCSU Olympic hopeful Jordan Davis; a UConn inspiration and more
*Jordan Davis of Wallingford, who made a national splash throwing the javelin for SCSU, completed his college career at Georgia now and finished second in the USA Track & Field championships in New York this summer. Davis’ 82.36-meter mark was topped on the last throw by (87.59). Those are world-class distances.
*After a standout four-year career at Yale and a few weeks with the 76ers in the NBA Summer League, Nick Townsend is going back to school. Townsend, granted a fifth year by the recent court actions, committed to Stanford. He averaged 16.3 points per game, 7.4 rebounds, 4.3 assists and shot 46.3% on 3-pointers for Yale last season.
*Tough break for former Yale captain and running back Josh Pitsenberger, who injured his ankle in a preseason game and went on injured reserve with the Texans. This kid’s one tough football player, a good bet to be back at it somewhere.
*Aaron Judge, who has been out since the end of May, said he wants to return to the Yankees in September without playing minor league rehab games. Good for him. How many times have you seen players, especially with the Yankees, get a second injury while rehabbing the original injury during these drawn out “protocols.” Can’t blame Judge for wanting no part of that.
*Don’t mind alternative uniforms, but a completely different color? UConn in red just doesn’t work.
Summer reading
“The Subway Series: New York City’s Illustrious Baseball Tradition,” by Rick Laughland (Lyon Press) is a walk through the history of the World Series contested by two New York teams, which was practically an annual thing between 1921 and 1956, but has happened only once since. And who knows if we’ll see it again in our lifetimes? The 272-page paperback is available on Amazon. That’s a wrap on summer, hope y’all got your reading in.
Opinion: New York Yankees president says CT senator wrong on college sports issue
Last word
Had the popcorn out this week as Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Yankees president Randy Levine, vice chair of the presidential committee looking into resolving the chaos that has befallen college sports, sparred on the pages of The Courant. Levine has always been big on op-ed pieces to get his side’s points across; he has been a strong supporter of the Protect College Sports Act and has been pressing Connecticut’s senators, starting with an Aug. 17 piece in the Sports Business Journal, to get on board with the bipartisan bill, invoking its importance to UConn. Amendments have been added and subtracted, as in the usual legislative process. One key change recently was good for UConn: language that appeared to shut UConn out of future power conference expansion has been taken out, as power conferences have been lobbying to keep their prerogatives open.
Blumenthal, who has authored a bill on this topic in the past, and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who has been a strident advocate of student-athlete rights, have yet to be convinced. It would be naive to believe the power-conference proponents of this bill have UConn’s interests top of mind, but from what I have been hearing, UConn officials — while recognizing the bill is far from perfect — generally support it as a step in the right direction and anticipate eventual agreement with the legislators.
Opinion: A lasting path to protecting the best of college sports