Among the first acts of the offseason for the Red Sox: conversations with upset veteran players.
Chief baseball officer Craig Breslow and manager Chad Tracy met with first baseman Willson Contreras for more than two hours on Sunday, Breslow said, to discuss “a host of things.” Contreras last week heavily intimated that the organization is overly reliant on data and analytics.
Separately, Tracy said he has spoken with Sonny Gray, who was unhappy about being pulled in the fifth inning of what turned out to be the last game of the season, a loss to the Yankees last Wednesday.
“Five months of relationship-building with players, and I think there’s some things that get painted sometimes that stained it or ruined it,” Tracy said Monday during the Red Sox decision-makers’ end-of-season news conference at Fenway Park. “It’s like, no, I have a very good working relationship with [Gray], and I’ve had numerous conversations with him throughout the course of the year. But yeah, was able to talk to him. It’s in a fine place while also understanding his feelings on it.”
Contreras, who emerged as a statistical and emotional leader in his first season with the Red Sox, said Wednesday that he was censoring himself from being fully honest about why he felt the Sox petered out after a scorching summer.
He said in part: “It’s not enough when you have talent or you have data or you have computers telling you what to do. This is baseball and the data is here to help us. But at the end of the day, you’re going to need experience and veteran guys to win games.”
Those sentiments added a layer of complexity to the usual postmortem debriefs between players and upper management, especially for an organization that aspires to be better in 2027 and beyond.
Breslow acknowledged seeing what Contreras had said and noted that his interpretation was “a little bit different than there are clearly things that he wants fixed and changed.”
“We actually had a great conversation, Trace and I, with Willson,” Breslow said. “Many of those [details] I will keep private just to protect or just to kind of preserve the relationship that we have. But it was incredibly constructive and covered a wide scope of things. And Willson would be the right person to ask directly, but he spoke very, very highly of his time here, how much he’s looking forward to 2027, and the way that he and his family appreciated the Red Sox.”
Contreras likewise expressed publicly last week how much he enjoyed being a member of the team this year.
On the Gray front, Tracy chalked up the pitcher’s displeasure to most any starter not wanting to come out of the game in that moment. Gray said afterward that he “would’ve liked to have been trusted,” and that other Sox would agree that he should have been left in.
“I thought he answered the questions that were asked to him in a very professional manner,” Tracy said. “Do I think he was wanting to stay out there? Quite obviously.”
With the Red Sox down by one, Tracy pulled Gray after 4⅔ innings and 19 batters — the same scenario he yanked Payton Tolle from the night prior. Both times, Tracy brought in lefthander Erik Miller to face a lefthanded batter. Miller had endured a terrible September but had a strong appearance in his last regular-season game.
Tracy adamantly pushed back on the idea that such moves are scripted before the game in concert with the front office.
“The decisions are mine,” Tracy said. “Do we have data analytics? Of course we do. Everybody does. Is somebody standing there pushing me, saying you need to do this, this, and this? Absolutely not.
“The easiest way to say it is it was my call. It’s my decision. It went south. Here we are. But again, I think the biggest thing for me coming into this [news conference] was maybe dispelling any notion of people thinking that decisions get made prior to the game or with a piece of paper or with any computer. If I can do anything just to dispel that, say, those decisions are always going to fall on me.
“And I can speak highly of Bres with that. He’s never — nobody has ever come in and done that. We do have information. We look at it completely holistically and try to do that. Different games present different scenarios. But that’s my call.”
The 87-win season — featuring a wild summer turnaround — and fleeting two-game postseason cameo left the bosses to balance their messaging: pride in the regular season, disappointment in the rest.
“We didn’t capitalize on our summer success. I think [that is the] feeling that’s echoing in my head,” Breslow said. “I’d also maybe push back a bit on this was kind of 35-ish games of excellence and 127 games of mediocrity. When you think about or you look at the overall totality of the record from July 1 on, it was three months of playing [at a] 104-kind-of-win pace.
“This was more than just a run. I think it showed some true underlying talent. But we obviously have a lot of work to do to get where we want to go heading into 2027.”
Tim Healey can be reached at timothy.healey@globe.com. Follow him @timbhealey.