September is over and so is Red Sox season. NESN’s wildly hyped “Soxtober” playoff coverage never made it to the 10th month.
Boston baseball’s 2026 thrill ride came to a sad and sloppy conclusion Wednesday in the Bronx as the Yankees completed a two-game Wild Card Series sweep, 9-2, over the punchless Red Sox.
The ’26 Sox were a gift. Chad Tracy’s upstarts saved New England’s summer the way Scotland saved our World Cup. They recovered from a 32-46 start with a record-breaking 32-5 June/July stretch, bringing Fenway to life and creating new interest in a team that features its ancient ballpark as the franchise star.
Unfortunately, the bad Sox re-emerged in September as baseball’s worst-hitting team (.219). That malaise carried into the playoffs, where they scored two runs in 18 innings.
Straight sets, 9-0 and 9-2. An aggregate 18-2. A plus-16 for the Yankees, and a record in the era of the best-of-three wild card format.
“Disappointing,” said Tracy, who’s going to get big heat for going to the bullpen too early in back-to-back losses. “The goal is to win the World Series. It’s frustrating.”
It was downright embarrassing. Given what’s going on with Drake Maye and the Patriots and the post-Jaylen Brown Celtics, it suddenly feels like there’s little to celebrate in New England sports. Anybody up for Eastern Michigan at UMass, 3:30 Saturday at McGuirk Stadium?
Let it never be said that your Red Sox stopped celebrating. When Willson Contreras homered off Max Fried in the sixth — ending Boston’s string of 26⅔ consecutive scoreless playoff innings over two autumns — Contreras jogged slowly around the bases, taunting the starter and his team.
Minutes later, the Yanks jumped all over reliever Garrett Crochet — he did not record an out in his first appearance since April 25 — putting the game and the series to rest with six more runs, capped by a Cody Bellinger three-run homer off Garrett Whitlock.
“I feel healthy,” Crochet said postgame, “but I feel like [expletive] for our season to end the same way that it did last year.”
No matter. When Nick Sogard cut New York’s lead to 8-2 with a solo blast in the seventh, he donned the nifty green Wally head for a victory lap in the Sox dugout. It was the same in the ninth, when Contreras drew a leadoff walk. Down, 9-2, Contreras pinwheeled his bat toward the on-deck circle, then jogged to first.
It’s just what the Red Sox do.
There’s certainly no doubt that the best team won this series. The Yankees beat the Sox in four straight postseason games over two seasons and in the final four games between them this year, New York outscoring Boston, 43-5.
The Sox managed only seven hits in the two wild-card games, not a one with a runner on base. In the top of the ninth Wednesday, NBC delivered an image of a Sox fan in the stands wearing a bag on his head.
Before the finale, New York Post columnist Mike Vaccaro called the Sox an “annoyance” and compared Boston’s Nine to legendary tomato can boxer “Tex Cobb against the ropes, absorbing one Larry Holmes haymaker after another.”
This was before we learned of yet another punch to the gut in the form of a new (and old) right hand/wrist injury to would-be star outfielder Roman Anthony, who was hurt for the bulk of this season and officially ruled out after visiting Sox doctors in Boston early Wednesday morning.
“I feel sick to my stomach,” Anthony said when he relayed the news at Yankee Stadium. All of Red Sox Nation seconded that emotion.
But injuries are no excuse for this playoff performance. The Yankees were playing without Aaron Judge, a three-time MVP and the best player in the American League. Boston baseball boss Craig Breslow and his minions built a team woefully short on power and offensive production. That’s on the Sox, not injuries and bad juju.
Both losses featured the same pattern: an early pitcher’s duel, followed by a New York jailbreak in the late innings.
“They were games that were close, but they kind of pulled away,” said Tracy.
Game 2 featured 36-year-old Sox righty Sonny Gray, who went 18-5 with a 2.72 ERA in 2026, against Fried, who was 5-5 with a 2.80 ERA. Lots of soft stuff — sweepers, sliders, and cutters.
They threw zeros at one another until the bottom of the fourth when Luis García Jr. — leading off the inning — turned on a 1-2 sweeper and drove it over the wall in right.
Tracy didn’t endear himself to Sox Nation when he pulled Gray after 70 pitches and went to Erik Miller with men on first and third and two out in the fifth. He also went to Miller first out of the pen Tuesday — lifting Payton Tolle in the fifth — and paid the price when Ben Rice hit Miller’s third pitch over the wall in center.
It happened again in Game 2. Bellinger greeted Miller with an RBI single to right to make it, 2-0.
“I would like to have been trusted in the moment,” said Gray, in a midnight interview that made it sound like he’s already got a foot out the door.
Then came the Contreras homer and taunt. The baseball gods immediately went to work.
In his first appearance in more than four months, Crochet fanned Spencer Jones, but the ball squirted away from Sox catcher Adley Rutschman and Jones made it to first safely. He then stole second, went to third on a throwing error by Rutschman, and scored on a hard single by George Lombard Jr.
The rout was on. Crochet never got a batter out and Bellinger delivered his slam-dunk homer.
“They were able to string a bunch of hits together there and we couldn’t stop the bleeding,” said Tracy. “It just didn’t work out.”
Farewell, 2026 Red Sox.
You saved our summer. Then fell hard in the fall.
Dan Shaughnessy is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at daniel.shaughnessy@globe.com. Follow him @dan_shaughnessy.