Instant reaction to the Sonny Gray trade
It had been just about two weeks since Craig Breslow sat in his Cosmopolitan Hotel suite in Las Vegas and talked in somewhat surprising specifics.
Besides the middle of the order bat, the priority was the level of starting pitcher the Red Sox thought they were going to get at the trade deadline, but couldn't reel in.
“Starting pitching. And particularly someone we feel can start alongside or slot in behind Garrett and start a playoff game for us," Breslow said during the GM meetings when asked what he was focusing in on. "Because of the depth that we’ve built up over the last couple of years, we feel pretty good about overall starting pitching and Nos. 3-ish through 10-ish, and that’s not to take away from guys who are certainly capable of doing more. It’s just to say, I don’t think we’re going to spend a ton of time trying to add a No. 4 or a No. 5 starter. If we’re going to make a starting pitching addition, I think it should be somebody who can pitch at the front of a rotation and start a playoff game for us."
Then came the Sonny Gray trade, which led to Breslow drifting back into a place where there was plenty of room for interpretation.
"I don’t know how much sense it makes in November to put a number on a guy. I think Sonny is a very talented major league player," the Red Sox's chief baseball officer said when asked if the pitcher he had just traded for was what he had been referencing in Vegas. "The seasons that he has put up pretty consistently indicate that to be the case. That said, we still intend to improve our team and exactly what that looks like we don’t know right now. But we’ll continue to try and explore opportunities and figure out where that takes us."
So, which is it?
It was Breslow who (thankfully) introduced the number-assigning during that early November get-together, so that's why the Gray acquisition was met with the need for some definition right away.
Can Gray slot in "alongside" Crochet, or have the Red Sox simply taken advantage of an opportunity to get another "3-ish" starting pitching option?
The answer is a bit more complicated than most anticipated.
There are absolutely some in the Red Sox's front office who believe what Gray represents is exactly what Breslow was talking about. His ability to strike guys out, miss bats, and control the strike zone helps make that case. Some in those offices would even say 2025 Gray isn't that far off from 2025 Joe Ryan.
JOE RYAN
SONNY GRAY
"We start by evaluating the performance on the field and try and understand what abilities and what metrics are sticky from year to year because we’re making a bet on what anybody is going to be in 2026 not what they have been in the past," Breslow explained.
"The strikeout rate and walk rate are a good place to start. Beyond that, he is a guy whose secondaries make up a significant part of the roster. Particularly, his sweeper and curveball are two really, really good pitches. You can look at the whiff rate and the chase rate on the sweeper and say this is the foundation of a really strong arsenal. It will be a great match for (pitching coach Andrew Bailey) Bails and the rest of the pitching group and the philosophies they have in terms of leaning into strength and potentially away from slug and pitching away from fastballs when you have secondaries as your best pitch."
If Gray can be the guy Breslow and Co. believe he can be in 2026, recreating the dominance of 2023 (2.79 ERA in 32 starts; 2nd-place American League Cy Young finish), that will work. It would be one year of dominance while deciphering whether the Red Sox already have that No. 2 starter in waiting on the roster.
But there is a caveat.
While a lot of the underlying analytics for Gray last season suggest he isn't far off from that 2023 dominance, when it trends in the other direction at 36, some uncertainty is immediately raised.
What made Breslow's Vegas proclamation so on-point was the reality the postseason gave us: You find a couple of no-doubt-about-it dominant starters and build off of that.
Maybe the Red Sox got that guy at a much more manageable price (Richard Fitts, Brandon Clarke) and commitment (one year) than some of these other options would necessitate. At first glance, it feels like Gray could be sold as a top-of-the-rotation anchor for a team caught in the middle of contention. For a team in the current state of the Red Sox, however, the three-time All-Star feels closer to the rotation's 3-ish than the 2-ish.
"We’re kind of in this window where we need to compete, and we need to compete for the division, we need to compete for a deep postseason run, and that's the cost of doing business," Breslow said of trading Fitts and Clarke. "(Fitts) was great for us while he was here. He came over in a trade a couple of years ago and was completely bought into what we were hoping that he would do in terms of getting bigger and stronger and adding velocity and leaning into his secondaries, then with Brandon, a guy that we drafted, really, really exciting stuff. And they're both easy guys to root for. And you know, you hope that when you have these trades like it works out for both sides. We'll hope that each of those guys goes on to successful, Major League careers, and we hope that Sonny is everything that we need him to be in 2026 for us."
Right now, what the Red Sox need Sonny to be is a pitcher who fends off Father Time and makes sure this front office's instincts were correct.
In the short term, what the Red Sox fans need is a bit more convincing.