NEW YORK (AP) — Sonny Gray will have to save Boston's season on the mound that derailed his big league career.
With the Red Sox trailing after losing the opener of the best-of-three Wild Card Series against the Yankees 9-0, Gray on Wednesday night will face a fan base that gave him the Bronx brush-off in 2017 and 2018.
“There’s a lot of people and a lot of players that can have one bump in the road and not get back on the tracks,” he said Tuesday. “And
for me, there’s been bumps along the way and that may have been a little bit of a bigger bump than others.”
Approaching his 37th birthday, Gray tied for the major league lead with 18 wins this year along with a 2.72 ERA, his best in a full season. He took a no-hit bid into the eighth inning against the Yankees at Fenway Park in June as the Red Sox completed a four-game sweep that sparked their turnaround from a 32-46 start to an 87-75 record and a playoff berth.
Gray has pitched at Yankee Stadium twice since leaving the team and done well both times. Most recently, he pitched three-run ball over 6 1/3 innings in Boston’s 5-3 win in the Bronx on June 5.
“He’s had a great career, and someone who I was never super comfortable facing,” Red Sox teammate Trevor Story said. “He’s a pitcher to its finest degree.”
Gray reached a nadir in New York before rebounding. He's been an All-Star twice since and has 143 wins over 14 seasons.
He was 15-16 with a 4.52 ERA for the Yankees, who acquired him from Oakland in July 2017. He notoriously was dropped from the rotation in August 2018 after he smirked when fans booed as he walked off the Yankee Stadium mound in the third inning of a 7-5 loss to Baltimore.
Gray had a 6.98 ERA at Yankee Stadium in 2018 and a 3.17 ERA on the road.
“It’s kind of like one of those things that you have a snowball or whatever, right?” Gray said. “There’s a snowball that kind of starts rolling down a hill. If you don’t ever stop it, then the snowball just gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and it picks up traction and it just gets more snow. And it just continues to go down this thing. And then the bigger the snowball gets, the harder it is to stop it or take a step back.
"And for me, it just took me to get away and get myself into a different environment and then reflect on those things.”
Pitching for Cincinnati (2019-21), Minnesota (2022-23) and St. Louis (2024-25) revived his career. Then he was traded to the Red Sox last November, putting him in position to pitch for the Yankees' biggest rival.
"New York was, it just wasn’t a good situation for me, wasn’t a great setup for me and my family,” he said during a December Zoom news conference. “I never wanted to go there in the first place.”
Now he'll be back, trying to outpitch the Yankees' Max Fried and extend the first-round series to a decisive third game.
“I do know that playing here made me a stronger person, made me a better man, a better husband," he said. “Ultimately, it made me a better pitcher, a better baseball player.”
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