On the night of February 13th, 2025, John Henry lit up a victory cigar to celebrate what would ultimately turn into one year of Alex Bregman’s services. Today, nearly 14 months later, Alex Bregman is gone, but the ashes from that cigar continue to catch fire and create new destructive flames on a seemingly daily basis.
Here is where it all started:
Fast-forward to today and the 2026 Red Sox are out of a gate with an abysmal 1-5 record. Worse yet, the fingerprints of the failed Bregman negotiations
can be found plastered all over it. Now, of course, there are many, many reasons for the Sox’ shameful start, but at least two of them are a pair of players who are on this roster specifically because the club didn’t want to commit to Bregman long-term at anything other than their price this past winter. And that’s really the point I want to get at here: Ranger Suarez and Caleb Durbin pretty much have to have solid seasons for the Red Sox to have any chance of putting the Bregman fire out. They don’t need to be MVP or Cy Young candidates, but they do (at minimum) need to come close to replicating their 2025 campaigns.
To cement why this is the case, let’s take a look at the timeline since the start of the new year. At noon on January 14, less than 100 hours after the news broke on social media, the Chicago Cubs officially announced the signing of Bregman, which he also personally retweeted.
Less than three hours later, the Red Sox made their push to shift the narrative. Jeff Passan broke the story of how Boston decided to spend the money originally allocated for Bregman:
So now the money was spent, but not on the hitter they desperately needed. And the reason for all of this is of course because they decided play footsie with Bregman for so long that by the time mid January rolled around, all of the other big, right-handed, infield bats that might have been worth a damn to sign like — Pete Alonso and Bo Bichette — were already off the board. (For comparison, Alonso got five years at $155 million, and Bichette got three years at $126 million.)
So, instead, the Red Sox decided to use the money that was supposed to go to one of those bats on Ranger Suarez, and the whole thing just became this perfect encapsulation of what happens when you try to work it backwards and make the roster fit the budget instead of bending the budget to fit the roster’s needs.
But we still weren’t done, because despite most of the money being spent, there was still a gigantic hole left at third base. This meant the Red Sox had to trade from their new found “excess” of starting pitching to get the right-handed infield bat they still lacked. Not surprisingly, they probably couldn’t get through a conversation for any of the bats they really wanted without Connelly Early, Payton Tolle or Marcelo Mayer’s name coming up, so they eventually had to set their sights lower on Caleb Durbin as part of a perplexing trade that went down like this on February 9:
The Red Sox traded Kyle Harrison, David Hamilton and Shane Drohan to the Milwaukee Brewers in exchange for Caleb Durbin, Andruw Monasterio, and Anthony Seigler.
And of course the cherry on top of it all is that Harrison is both one of the guys who came over in the Devers trade and the arm the front office deemed expendable after they used the Alex Bregman money to sign another starting pitcher. That’s the guy they used to acquire a young third baseman after they managed to fumble away both Devers and Bregman.
So make no mistake, these transactions are all connected, and this entire season is going to be a referendum on the radical reconstruction of the irregular roster left behind when the Bregman negotiations fell apart. Oh, and in almost poetic fashion, Alex Bregman and the Cubs will visit Fenway for the very last series of the season on September 25th through the 27th. The atmosphere for that three game set going to feel like a jury releasing their verdict at a murder trial.
But let’s get back to Suarez and Durbin specifically. They have to be good to prevent this Bregman thing from becoming radioactive. Not just because their presence here is so obviously connected to Bregman’s departure in 2026, but because literally everything else connected to Bregman’s arrival in 2025 has already turned into a flaming trainwreck.
There’s losing the second round pick of the 2025 draft for just one year of Bregman’s services. There’s Rafael Devers throwing himself a pity party after Bregman took over at third base. And then, of course, there’s the ensuing salary dump trade that’s left the Red Sox lineup with a noticeable lack of thump ever since.
But you know what’s crazy? Even at that point in the proceedings, this whole odyssey was still very salvageable. All they had to do was pay Bregman a fraction of the money they dumped in the Devers deal and hang onto the young guys they got back. Instead, they never met the moment when it came to a long-term Bregman contract, and have since traded away both James Tibbs and Kyle Harrison.
So far in the very early output of the 2026 season, James Tibbs has an 1.827 OPS in Triple-A, and Kyle Harrison looked great in his one start with the Brewers, which included eight strike outs in five innings of work.
And just to be complete here, the Red Sox are also paying $4 million for each of the next two years for Jordan Hicks, who was so bad in Boston after coming back as part of the Devers trade last year that they had to move him to the White Sox over the winter in a deal where the White Sox will only pay for part of his salary.
So once again, as far as this front office is concerned, Ranger Suarez and Caleb Durbin have to be good! So far, literally everything else connected to Alex Bregman’s tenure here has turned toxic, and with both Suarez and Durbin being under team control for at least the next five years, the only way this story has a happy ending for the folks who set the wheels in motion is if these two guys end up being useful contributors.
And to be clear, they just have to be good, not great. The Red Sox don’t need Suarez to be a Cy Young candidate, they have Garrett Crochet for that. They just need him to be the guy that posted a 3.25 ERA over the last five years before he got his big payday. The Red Sox don’t need Caleb Durbin to fully replace Alex Bregman, they just need him to look like the guy who finished third in rookie of the year voting last season.
But so far out of the gate, Suarez and Durbin look a lot more like guys turning to stone in the continued curse of everything that touches the Alex Bregman web as opposed to guys who are ready to make a meaningful contribution to the 2026 Red Sox.
Now the flip side of this is Suarez has made just one bad start in a Red Sox uniform so far and Durbin is only 18 at-bats into his Red Sox tenure, but man, something about this feels ominous. Suarez was also terrible in his outing for Team Venezuela against Japan in the World Baseball Classic in which he gave up five runs in just 2.2 innings of work. And worse yet, this is a guy who is known for pitching well in big games and carries a 1.48 ERA in 42.2 innings of postseason work. When you consider how bad he was against Japan and that he was facing off against Yoshinobu Yamamoto, it’s minor miracle Venezuela ended up getting through that game and winning the tournament.
Then there’s Durbin, who feels like he got the absolute most out of his ability in 2025. If he can replicate that, fantastic! But he also might be one of those guys who turns into a pumpkin as quickly as he showed signs of promise and can never replicate that near-3.0 WAR season again.
Either way, these are the stakes for Suarez, Durbin, the front office, and this entire 2026 Red Sox season. Both the team and most of its main characters have gotten off to about as bad of a start imaginable, but but I don’t want to start shoveling dirt on them quite yet. Baseball has a funny way of sometimes making the first week nothing more than a mirage. For instance, just last season the Brewers (Durbin’s old team), gave up 46 runs in their first four games en route to an 0-4 start. They then of course went on to win 97 games and had the lowest ERA of any team in the National League.
This is classic baseball! It will scare you with fake monsters while hiding the real ones back for later in the proceedings. Who knows, two weeks from now we might be singing the praises of both Suarez and Durbin and talking about how bad Bregman looks in Chicago. But until or unless that happens, we’re going to be left to confront the fallout from those fateful winter nights when Alex Bregman came into and left the Red Sox organization.
