Boston’s Triple-A managers have usually been All in the Family— usually, but not always, All in the Family. They had either played for the Red Sox or previously managed in the farm system.
So when the team’s director of player development Brian Abraham hired Chad Tracy to manage the WooSox in December, 2021, he was testing tradition.
There were a lot of applicants, Abraham said after the team’s Hall of Fame formalities ended Thursday night, but the sense of connection he felt with Tracy was strong right from the first interview and he has never regretted the decision.
“It has worked out really well,” Abraham said. “Maybe even better than expected.”
Indeed it has. Tracy has gone from being one of the best managers in Triple-A to being the hottest manager in Major League Baseball. He was back here Thursday evening as one of the WooSox’s newest Hall of Fame inductees.
The voting took place even before Boston’s 15-game winning streak.
Tracy spent a little more than four seasons managing the WooSox and often said that if he could not be in the major leagues, there was no better place to be than Worcester. Now that he is in the majors, Tracy treasures the time he spent at Polar Park.
“This place means a lot to me,” he said Thursday. “This place helped me grow.”
When January arrived seven months — only seven months; it seems like seven years — ago, Tracy was home in Ohio catching up on house projects, enjoying family time and planning on another pleasant season in Worcester.
In February, he was voted into the WooSox Hall of Fame. In March, he sat down with a reporter at JetBlue Park and talked about what he was looking forward to for the 2026 season and where his baseball career might be headed, if a major league managing job was part of that future.
Chad Tracy’s dad, Jim, managed the Dodgers, Rockies and Pirates. Chad Tracy learned a lot, absorbed a lot of baseball, during those years. That was one reason his transition from Triple-A manager to Boston seemed so seamless.
“I grew up around it, I watched my dad do it,” Chad Tracy said. “I sat in on meetings, I talked to people, so I had a pretty good idea of what the day- to-day looked like, so this is not crazy different from Triple-A, no.”
Tracy had his entire family on hand. He saw video tributes from them and others including Red Sox southpaw Payton Tolle. One of Tracy’s attributes as a manager has been his even-temperedness but even he got the sniffles while addressing the crowd.
One of the most heartfelt tributes came from Jim Tracy.
“From one manager to another, and from a father to a son, I can’t tell you how proud I am when asked to tell people you’re my son,” he said.
When Chad Tracy took the job he knew it would be more than balls and strikes, double steals, hit-and-runs. He had to set a tone outside the foul lines, outside the bullpens, beyond the dugouts. That he succeeded was apparent in how many people from the WooSox family were at the induction, far beyond the list of dignitaries.
Why Tracy has not had “interim” removed from his job description is a bit of a mystery. The last Red Sox interim manager to have this kind of impact was Joe Morgan in 1988. He was only seven days into Morgan’s Magic and its 12-game winning streak when the team put him under contract through the end of the season.
For now, interim works since it is big league interim. Full-time seems only a matter of time for Tracy though, and he talked about a possible promotion back in March.
“If you get there,” he said, “it speaks to everything you’ve done before. You can say that this is a person who worked his [butt] off to get to that spot, and you get rewarded for it, and you can take care of your family and things like that.”
“You get one of those jobs,” he said, “and tell yourself ‘I hope I’m here for 15 years.’ The reality is, that’s probably not gonna happen.”
Tracy may not make 15 years with Boston, but already has a string of 15 straight victories to go along with a Hall of Fame monument.
Bill Ballou can be reached at vetgoalie@aol.com
