End Of The Story?
The sports hernia did what Craig Breslow wouldn't: put Mayer at shortstop.
Yes, Story. Trevor Story went down a week ago. How’s it impacted the Sox?
The Red Sox went 4-2 in the first six games after the franchise shortstop landed on the IL. They’re 4-4 over the eight games since. Either way you slice it, the team is, quite literally, telling a different Story.
Now, look, we don’t root for injuries around here. That would be wrong. Trevor Story is a husband, a father, a leader, a captain of the 2026 Run to Home Base program, and a great clubhouse presence by every account in the Boston press corps. We wish him a swift and full recovery from the sports hernia surgery he underwent earlier this week.
We also note, with no agenda whatsoever, that this team appears to be writing a better chapter without him in the lineup.
Story went on the 10-day IL on May 16, retroactive to the 15th. He had surgery at the Vincera Institute in Philadelphia. He’s now expected to miss six to ten weeks, putting his return somewhere between mid-July and early August. Since the IL placement, the Red Sox lost a series in Atlanta, swept the Royals at Kauffman Stadium, and have continued play since. Three straight road wins in Kansas City for a team that came into that week 11.5 games out of first place. A .500 clip across the full stretch from a club sitting at .413 on the season.
How will they ever survive without their clubhouse leader?
Well, it turns out they’re doing just fine.
Here is what Trevor Story was producing at shortstop before the IL placement, just so we are all working from the same page. A .206 batting average. A .244 on-base percentage. A .303 slugging percentage. A .547 OPS. Three home runs. Nineteen RBI. And six errors at shortstop, which led the entire American League at the position. By Defensive Runs Saved he was minus one. By Outs Above Average he was minus two. By the eye test he was a guy with a groin issue trying to play through it for a month, which, in fairness, is exactly what he was.
The bar for replacing this production at shortstop is somewhere around sea level. The plot twist writes itself.
Here is the part that has been hiding in plain sight for anyone paying attention. The 2025 season looked productive on the surface. Story played 157 games for the first time in a Red Sox uniform. He led the team in home runs (25) and RBI (96), and stole 31 bases. But the under-the-hood numbers were already starting to slip. His .741 OPS was solid but well below his Colorado peaks. His barrel rate finished at 9.8 percent. His final wRC+ landed at a hair above league average. The shape of the player you saw in April and May of 2025, the guy with the career-high 15 percent barrel rate through three weeks, was not the same player by August and September. And it was never going to translate cleanly into 2026 at age 33 with a groin issue dragging since spring training.
Anyone running the numbers could see the trajectory.
Which is the irony of all this. Craig Breslow built his front office reputation on numbers. He is the Yale guy. The cost-benefit guy. The chief baseball officer who fired Alex Cora on a Saturday afternoon because the numbers said so. And yet, for whatever reason, Breslow seemed structurally incapable of looking at the obvious numbers staring him in the face at shortstop. The slugging. The errors. The barrel rate. The age. The injury history. The .547 OPS. The data was always there. The decision never came. Then a sports hernia made the decision for him.
This is a blessing in disguise. Just don’t expect the front office to call it that.
This is the part where Boston media circles back to the clubhouse stuff. Trevor Story is widely respected. The leadership matters. The presence matters. Fine. But the clubhouse can also be carried by a 38-year-old Aroldis Chapman taking a 104 mph Ha-Seong Kim comebacker off his foot in the ninth inning of a one-run game, scrambling off the turf, flipping to first to end it, and tying for tenth on the all-time saves list in the process. By Willson Contreras hitting a two-out, two-run home run in the eighth inning to win that game. By Jarren Duran making stellar plays in left field and going yard at Kauffman. Leadership in a baseball clubhouse is not a single-source resource. It is distributed. The Red Sox have other adults in the room.
Now to the part everyone keeps not saying loudly enough.
Marcelo Mayer, the actual shortstop of the future, the kid who came up last year and held his own and is by every scouting report a real player at the position, is starting at shortstop tomorrow. His first start at the position in 2026. Zero innings logged there all season until now. The day after Story went down, Tim Healey of the Boston Globe reported that Mayer was finally going to start taking reps at short. He took grounders before the May 18 game in Kansas City. Now he’s in the lineup card at the position he’s played his entire baseball life.
Which raises the actual question.
Why was Marcelo Mayer not already taking shortstop reps?
The kid played 269 of his 315 career minor league games at shortstop. He started 29 of 42 games at short for Triple-A Worcester last season. He has a 60-grade fielding tool and a plus arm by every scouting report you can find. SoxProspects has him as a potential above-average defender at the position. Chad Tracy, who managed Mayer at Worcester, called him “a graceful infielder” with a “very good internal clock.” This is not a guy who needed to be taught shortstop from scratch. This is a guy who needed to keep his glove warm at his natural position.
And nobody had him taking reps. Not in spring training. Not in April. Not in early May, while Story was on his way to a .547 OPS and a league-leading six errors at the position before going down. Mayer himself said it earlier this week. “He wouldn’t want to just throw me in there after not taking reps since the offseason.” Not since the offseason. Three months of major league baseball, and the team’s first-round investment at shortstop was not getting reps at shortstop, because the org was so locked in on Story that the contingency plan never even got drilled.
Compare this to Mookie Betts. Yes, I’m still bringing up Mookie Betts. Cover your eyes, Sox fans. Look away if you must. While Mookie was winning Gold Gloves in right field for the Red Sox and slugging his way to MVP votes, he was taking upward of 100 ground balls a day at shortstop and second base. Every single day. That habit started in Boston and followed him to Los Angeles, and when the Dodgers needed him to play shortstop, he slid over and turned into a Gold Glove caliber middle infielder. That is the model. That is what preparing a player for a position move looks like. The Red Sox had a 23-year-old former first-round shortstop on the roster the entire offseason and never told him to take grounders there.
That is not analytics. That is not strategy. That is malpractice.
The Globe, the Boston Sports Journal, Fox Sports, and pretty much every Red Sox writer with a functioning keyboard has now publicly made the obvious case for moving Mayer to short. The numbers guy in the front office didn’t listen until the sports hernia made it impossible to ignore.
Meanwhile, the Trevor Story tenure in Boston, in chronological order: 94 games in 2022 on a six-year, 140 million dollar contract. 43 games in 2023. Eight games in 2024 before a season-ending shoulder fracture. 157 games and a team-leading 25 home runs in 2025, which was the lone bright chapter of the entire deal, even if the underlying metrics were already softening. And now eight to ten weeks of recovery, no shortstop for the dog days of summer, and a third baseman hitting .165.
Without Trevor Story, the Red Sox are playing .500 ball. With him, they were a .413 team.
That is not a take. That is just the standings.
Mayer is at shortstop tomorrow. Three months too late, but he’s there.
Get well soon, Trevor. The Red Sox are busy writing a new chapter.
Well argued. The more perplexing question is : why is Breslow the Last Man Standing?