A wild storm of news surrounding the Boston Red Sox, Driveline, and Driveline founder Kyle Boddy has come out in the days following the Red Sox Wild Card Game 2 loss to the New York Yankees. Fans were shocked to hear postgame comments from leaders in the clubhouse pushing back against manager Chad Tracy and CBO Craig Breslow after the team's mentality all season, and reporters who dug further have now revealed this wasn't the first time the fissure affected the club.
The quotes started with Willson Contreras, who pushed back against the Red Sox heavy use of analytics to drive in-game decisions. Those comments lined up with Sonny Gray pointedly saying he wished he was given more trust to get out of the jam he found himself in in the fifth inning of the game.
After the team seemed so close-knit during the regular season, always hyping each other and Chad Tracy up, to see comments immediately pushing back against the Manager and CBO post-game was a shock. According to MassLive's Sean McAdam, it's not the first time the clubhouse has pushed back against the organization this season
Red Sox players have seemingly been unhappy with the organization for much longer than the fans knew
In a State of the Team article published on October 2, McAdam referenced the fact that pushback from the players in the clubhouse earlier in the season was what led to the team severing ties with Driveline founder Kyle Boddy. There was a big to-do when it was announced that Boddy was no longer a member of the organization, with fans who had lamented the Driveline approach and thought it was ruining the hitting celebrating his departure. McAdam's piece originally referred to the players' push towards "severing ties with Driveline," but was edited to target Boddy specifically.
Boddy pushed back on the article, though.
This report is inaccurate for several reasons.
— Kyle Boddy (@drivelinekyle) October 2, 2026
1) I never worked in Player Development for Boston.
2) My job over 2.5 years was to build the Baseball Sciences department and to advise Breslow mainly on R&D initiatives.
3) Only reason I'm not in Boston anymore is due to working…
Posting a reply to Section 10's Tyler Milliken, who posted the passage from McAdam's article to X, Boddy wrote, "This report is inaccurate for several reasons." He referenced that he was never part of Red Sox player development; he was with the Baseball Sciences and Research and Development departments, and that he left Boston due to a conflict of interest with his work with a team in Japan.
Two things can be deduced from this that are likely true in some way. The Red Sox player didn't like Boddy's involvement with the team. Just because he wasn't with player development doesn't mean he wasn't around the players and trying to provide tips they didn't appreciate. Boddy is probably trying to save face. He could have chosen the Japanese team over the Red Sox because he knew the Red Sox may have been trying to get him out the door anyway.
Red Sox Nation will likely never know the true answer as to what happened unless sources from inside the front office decide to shed light on what happened, which would seem unlikely. What is known is that the players have been unhappy with the team's heavy analytical approach.
This seems like something that could start to affect the team. As Milliken pointed out on X, there are still plenty of former Driveline employees working with the team, including John Soteropulos, the Sox's hitting coach. If free agents don't like the approach they are seeing from the team, or have a problem with Driveline, Boston may now be a place free agents stay away from.
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