The Boston Red Sox season ended when they were swept in the Wild Card Series by the New York Yankees, and Chad Tracy's decision to pull Sonny Gray at 70 pitches in a 1-0 game in the fifth inning was heavily criticized.
After the game, Willson Contreras was asked about Gray being pulled, and he made the motion of zipping his lips, refusing to get into it. However, he did shade the Red Sox's reliance on data which sparked much debate.
"It's not enough when you have talent, or you have data, or you have computers telling you what to do, because this is baseball," Contreras said. "The data is here to help us, but at the end of the day, you need experience and veteran guys to win games. There's a lot of stuff I would like to say, but I'll state it like that."
This is not the first time the Red Sox have been accused of relying too much on data. There was a notion going around after the game that the team predetermined what moves they were going to make before the game, based on analytics. The Red Sox held their end-of-season press conference on Monday, and Tracy shut that down.
"It was my call," Tracy confirmed. "It was my decision. It went south - here we are. The biggest thing, for me, coming into this, was dispelling any notion of people thinking that decisions get made prior to the game, or with a piece of paper, or with a computer."
The bullpen in both Games 1 and 2 against the Yankees ended up blowing up and making the game unmanageable. In both games, the Red Sox were in a position to stage a late comeback when the starter was pulled, but the games soon got out of reach.
The season is over now, and the Red Sox have to focus on getting over the hump next year. Getting healthy will certainly help, but Tracy learning from his mistakes this year will too.
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