I tried to be patient. I really did. It’s late April, and I know better than to overreact to a month of baseball from a team that was 43-45 last June before going on a tear. But there is a point where patience crosses the line into insanity, and Red Sox fans crossed it.
The Red Sox were 10-17 when the coaching staff got the ax. Last place in the AL East. They got swept at Fenway by the Yankees—THE YANKEES—and then went to Baltimore and got slaughtered 10-3 on Friday night. Seven losses in their last
eight games. In a season that was supposed to be a real run at the division.
The underlying numbers were just as bad as the eye-test results. Boston was hitting .226/.310/.333 as a team. Their slugging percentage is 30th in baseball. Dead last. Their OPS ranked 24th. They’d hit 13 home runs through 26 games—also last in the majors and they’d scored just 90 runs all season, 26th ranked. Willson Contreras and Wilyer Abreu had combined for nearly half the team’s home runs just by themselves.
This was not a slump after a month of baseball. This was a structural failure, and you have to look somewhere to shake things up. That somewhere ended up being, well, just about everyone. But it certainly needed to be Pete Fatse.
The numbers tell you what’s wrong, but watching the games tells you why.
The Red Sox were swinging at 62% of pitches in the strike zone. League average is 66%. That lack of aggression and eye compounded across every at-bat: falling behind in counts, handing pitchers the advantage before a ball is even put in play. On middle-middle pitches—your bog-standard meatballs—they were swinging just 61% of the time. League average on those pitches is 73%. Did this team just lose their eye let alone their confidence? Dead last in baseball in swinging at the most hittable pitches a pitcher can throw. Embarrassing.
Fatse went in front of reporters after a loss to the Cardinals two weeks ago and said the team needed to be more “convicted” before two strikes. Look, in theory that’s the right thing to want. But when your hitters are barely lifting the bat for the easiest pitches at the lowest rate in the league, “convicted” stops sounding like a coaching philosophy and starts sounding like a vague wish you whisper into the void. You can say it all you want. The results keep screaming back.
It didn’t stop with zone aggression. The Sox weren’t stealing bases—13 steals in 17 attempts through 26 games. They hit too many grounders, produced too few pulled fly balls, and generated almost no power from anyone outside of two hitters. This offense wasn’t just cold—it was in the Antarctic. The lack of confidence in themselves was beyond apparent.
The context surrounding this team kept getting worse. Sonny Gray—someone this team was relying on to be an innings eater—is on the IL with a hamstring strain. Roman Anthony—who hasn’t looked like himself and that’s frankly scary—has been in and out with a sore back. Payton Tolle got called up to eat Gray’s rotation spot, pitched an 11-strikeout GEM against the Yankees on Thursday, and the offense still could only scratch two runs across. Blowing that masterclass from Tolle is beyond reprehensible.
It’s not a pitching problem, though there are problems there too. The onus falls on a true lack of offensive identity. This lineup doesn’t know what it is or how it’s supposed to score.
The frustrating part is that the roster was never built to bash its way out of trouble. There’s no David Ortiz in there. No Mookie. Alex Bregman walked in free agency and wasn’t replaced with anyone who could fill that role. Trevor Story and Caleb Durbin both rank in the bottom three among all qualified MLB hitters in wRC+. Those are your 3-5 hitters on most days.
For a team constructed the way this one was—contact-oriented, built around traffic and pitch counts and manufacturing runs—EVERYTHING depends on staying aggressive in the zone, working counts, and doing damage when pitchers leave pitches over the middle. They continually play against an identity that’s embedded in the inherent construction of this roster.
Fatse had been here four+ years and frankly, it wasn’t not the first time we’d called for his head. He had beyond ample time to shape an approach. The results of his approach were abysmal in 2026.
Firing Fatse and co. doesn’t fix everything. It won’t turn Story into a .310 hitter or conjure a cleanup bat that Breslow didn’t acquire this winter. The roster still has real limitations, and those deserve their own conversation. But Fatse and the coaching staff represented the most actionable move available, and doing so at least signaled that the organization understood this was deeper than a bad April—that the approach being coached was part of the problem, not just a byproduct of a cold stretch.
