Red Sox name WooSox’ Chad Tracy as interim manager

While he is decidedly not the Chad Tracy who spent the bulk of a mid-sized career with the Diamondbacks in the early part of this century, this Chad Tracy has spent his entire life around the game. Chad’s father Jim played professional baseball for eight years, breaking through to the Majors with the Cubs for 87 games while otherwise bouncing around between places like Pompono Beach, Florida and Yokohama, Japan. Chad never knew his father as a ballplayer, as he was born one season after his old man finally put his glove away for good.

But he always knew his father as a coach. Jim Tracy got his first minor league managerial gig with the Peoria Chiefs when Chad was just two years old and then spent the next 20 years coaching in some capacity, culminating in his 11-year stretch as a big league manager with the Dodgers, Pirates, and Rockies. Naturally, Chad himself was a ballplayer.

He starred as a catcher at Pepperdine University, winning the West Coast Conference Player of the year award in 2005 before being drafted by the Texas Rangers in the third round. Tracy spent the next eight years in the minors, slowly climbing the ladder and eventually playing 390 games at the AAA level but never cracking the majors for so much as a cup of coffee. After spending two years in the independent Atlantic League, the then-28-year-old Tracy finally gave up the dream and followed his father’s footsteps into the manager’s office, making his debut with the single-A Burlington Bees in the Angels organization the very next year.

He would go on to spend seven years with the Angels, the last four as their Minor League Coordinator before being hired to lead the WooSox by Chaim Bloom in 2022. Is he any good? I will happily die on the hill known as Mount None of Us Actually Knows Whether a Baseball Manager is Any Good.