On June 25, the Red Sox broadcast network NESN posted a promo for that night’s game on the social media site X.
“The best comeback stories always start with a Yankees series,” the post read.
Fans’ replies to that post were… unkind, if understandable. The team had just blown a lead against the last-place Colorado Rockies for the second time in three days, dropping its record to an American League worst 32-46. Ace starting pitcher Garrett Crochet, rising star outfielder Roman Anthony and shortstop Trevor Story were not expected to return anytime soon from their injuries. Those damn Yankees, then leading the AL East, were clear of the Red Sox in the standings by 15 1/2 games.
Most know what happened next. The team’s sweep of their archrival launched a stretch unlike anything even lifelong fans have ever seen. There was a 15-game winning streak, which tied a team record set 80 years ago, when Ted Williams was en route to the first of his two AL MVP awards. There was a stretch of 26 wins in 29 games, sometimes in dramatic fashion. Just last week, the Red Sox beat the White Sox 12-11 in 13 innings, which ESPN’s Buster Olney called “the game of the year, without a doubt, and one of the greatest regular-season games ever.”
Even after stumbling over the weekend, losing two of three games to the Athletics, the team’s chances of making the playoffs — once a pipe dream — sit at over 95%, according to the website Fangraphs.
While faster-paced sports may have surpassed it in popularity, this Red Sox season has offered a reminder of why many still consider baseball their favorite sport. The odyssey that is the Major League Baseball regular season is a feature, not a bug. It allows time to weave a story that is a complex tapestry of setbacks and unexpected heroes. And if you give it attention, the 162-game parable even reveals some lessons.
Here is what we have learned from the 2026 Red Sox.
Adversity can be an opportunity.
Few would have faulted the leadership of the Red Sox from looking at the injuries to Crochet, Anthony and Story to conclude, “This is just not our year.” Instead, left-handed pitcher Jake Bennett, brought to the team in an unheralded offseason trade, has helped plug Crochet’s hole in the rotation. Andruw Monasterio — an afterthought in the trade headlined by the team’s new third baseman, Caleb Durbin (more on him in a second) — has stepped into the shortstop void. Masataka Yoshida, who seemed to have no role on the team when the season started, has been a competent left-handed hitter in Anthony’s absence.
The lesson isn’t that adversity is secretly good. It’s that waiting for ideal conditions before you perform is itself a choice, and usually the wrong one. The Red Sox didn’t get to choose a healthier roster. They chose what to make do with the one they had.
Improvement often results not from one big change but many smaller ones.
The most dramatic moments of this season — the sweep, the streak, the August night against the White Sox — get the headlines. But they were the visible tip of something much less cinematic: a Red Sox offense that, in the season’s first two months, ranked near the bottom of the league with runners in scoring position and then simply got better at the boring parts of hitting. Working deeper into counts. Cutting down on strikeouts with men on base. Coming through with two outs. That change in approach is not always evident on the highlight reel. But all of it, compounded over weeks, is what turned close losses into close wins. In our lives, too, our turnarounds often don’t happen in a single heroic swing. Rather, they happen one day — or one at-bat — at a time.
Believe in yourself, even when no one else does.
As the trade deadline approached, there was still considerable public pressure on the front office to sell off veterans and rebuild for next year. Chief baseball officer Craig Breslow held firm, declining to wave the white flag on a team that he said still believed in, even as it was giving him little evidence to justify the confidence. That is a different and harder kind of leadership than the kind that looks good when things are already going well. It’s easy to believe in a plan once it’s working. It’s much harder to hold that same conviction while critics are telling you, loudly, that you’re wrong. A good leader should not deny reality if new information challenges their beliefs. But being resolute often pays off, too.
When it’s fun to come to work, productivity follows.
While the Red Sox were in their early season funk, the team made the unusual move of parting ways with manager Alex Cora, who had led them to the 2018 World Series title. While it may be unfair to lay solely at Cora’s feet the team’s uninspired and sloppy play through the first 27 games of the season, the team is clearly playing with more joy under new manager Chad Tracy. Durbin, who hit .163 over his first 48 games this season, largely credits his personal turnaround to his teammates and the way they feed off each other. A roster that enjoys each other’s company plays looser and keeps grinding, even in a game that seems to be lost. Fun, it turns out, does not impede productivity. Often, it’s the mechanism.
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Not unlike the Red Sox, none of us gets to choose whether we will always have the ideal amount of resources at our disposal or whether our critics will wait to see how things turn out. What we can choose is how we respond to the hand we’re dealt — whether we let a setback be the whole story, or just the first chapter.
On Aug. 7, the Red Sox trailed five separate times in the same game and still found a way to win it in the 13th inning. That’s not a bad way to think about the rest of any season — in baseball, or otherwise.
