With the Red Sox’ season continuing to spiral — they’re buried in the AL East cellar and have the American League’s second-worst record — speculation about a potential deadline sale continues to mount. The team hasn’t made any major directional decisions at this juncture, but if they opt to go the seller’s route, veteran right-hander Sonny Gray will be open-minded about waiving his full no-trade protection, he tells Tim Healey of the Boston Globe.
“If someone came to me from the Red Sox and made a decision that that’s the direction that this team was going to go, I would be open for a conversation,” Gray said. The 36-year-old righty declined to indicate whether geography would play any sort of role in his decision process.
Gray landed in Boston via an offseason trade that sent right-hander Richard Fitts and minor league lefty Brandon Clarke to St. Louis. That swap saw a rebuilding Cardinals club working to boost its farm system and trim payroll to a win-now Red Sox club looking to build out its rotation. Months later, it’s the Cardinals who are in contention and the Sox who find themselves weighing a possible reset. The Cards are seven games over .500 and currently in possession of a National League Wild Card spot.
Though Boston has struggled this season, Gray’s performance hasn’t been a contributing factor. He missed two weeks with a hamstring strain he suffered in late April but has been sharp when on the mound. The 2023 American League Cy Young runner-up boasts a 3.12 ERA in 69 1/3 innings.
Gray has fanned a career-low 19.4% of his opponents but is sporting a terrific 6% walk rate — the sort of plus command that we’ve come to expect from him over the years. Gray has never been a flamethrower, but he’s living in the 91-93 mph range this season (91.8 mph average four-seamer, 92.3 mph average sinker), which is down more than a mile per hour from his peak velocity. His 9.1% swinging-strike rate is nearly two percentage points shy of league average and a full three percentage points shy of last year’s 12.1% mark, so it doesn’t seem there’s a huge rebound in punchouts on the horizon. Gray has produced his highest ground-ball rate since 2020 (48.1%) however, and opponents aren’t making all that much hard contact against him.
When Gray was traded from St. Louis to Boston, he restructured his contract such that it paid him a $31MM salary this season with a $10MM buyout on a $30MM mutual option for the 2027 season. The Cards kicked in $20MM to cover roughly half of that one-year commitment. That $20MM presumably went toward his 2026 salary, meaning a new team would owe the prorated portion of the remaining $11MM in salary plus the $10MM buyout on that mutual option. The Red Sox, of course, could include cash in any deal to offset some of the expenditure for a trade partner.
It bears emphasizing that the mutual option won’t be viewed by any acquiring teams as a possible extension of club control. It’s been 12 years since a mutual option was exercised in MLB by both parties (Brewers, Aramis Ramirez in 2014). Mutual options are more or less accounting measures, effectively functioning as small-scale deferrals by kicking a portion of a player’s guaranteed salary for one season onto the following year’s books in the form of an option buyout. Generally speaking, if a player performs well enough for the team to exercise its end of an option, that player has likely performed well enough to turn down his end of the option in search of a larger deal on the open market. Conversely, if the player is exercising his end of an option, it’s because he doesn’t he feel he can top that option value in free agency (whether due to injury or poor performance), thus leading the team to decline its end.
All of that is to pointed out to underscore the fact that opposing teams will view Gray as a pure rental. The Sox should have plenty of motivation to trade him if they can’t turn the ship around. Gray rejected a qualifying offer from the Twins following his terrific 2023 season, and players are only eligible for one QO in their career. As such, the Red Sox won’t receive any compensation for his departure in free agency if they hold him until season’s end.
Gray, along with teammate Aroldis Chapman, would be one of the more interesting arms on the summer trade market. Low-payroll clubs might balk at the hefty $10MM buyout on Gray’s 2027 option, but as noted, the Sox could pay some or all of that down. A larger-payroll club in need of rotation help (e.g. Phillies, Braves) might be more willing to take on that large buyout and pay a slightly lesser prospect cost.
For now, Boston’s focus presumably remains on trying to salvage a massively disappointing season. They’ve reportedly been looking to add a right-handed bat this month, so a shift to selling off veteran pieces hasn’t yet taken hold. The remainder of the team’s second-half schedule is a mixed bag. They just won two of three in Seattle and now head to Coors Field for three games against MLB’s worst club. They also still have three games against the AL’s worst club (the Angels) and three against a similarly disappointing Mets team remaining on their first-half schedule. On the tougher end of the spectrum, the Sox still have three series against winning clubs on the docket before the Midsummer Classsic: three games against the Nationals, three against the White Sox and four against the archrival Yankees.
