Welcome back to our 2025 Red Sox Postmortem. After talking about the things we loved and hated, grading Craig Breslow and Alex Cora, reevaluating the Rafael Devers trade, and handing out individual awards, today we turn our attention to the big question: was the 2025 Red Sox season a success?

Yeeeeeahhhhuuuuhhhhhhhhehhhhhhhhhhhhhnnnnnnnnnno. No. It’s not a success, no. It’s certainly not a failure, and it’s certainly a step in the right direction (Sam Kennedy would be proud of me for saying that). But season that ends at the hands of the Yankees in the Wild Card round cannot be considered a success for a franchise with our pedigree. Positive strides were made this year, and the future looks bright. However, I can’t call 2025 a “success,” in the most pure sense of the word.

— Fitzy Mo Peña

It’s an improvement, but not quite a success. Seeing the young guys play was awesome, and I’m super excited for what they can do in a whole season in 2026. Garrett Crochet was fantastic, Brayan Bello defined himself as a player more than he ever has before — but Rafael Devers was victimized and Nick Pivetta became a No. 2 starter in San Diego, so it was a bit of a rough go for me personally.

But the way it ended did give us the chance to see the Yankees get humiliated by the Blue Jays once more in 2025, so I’ll consider that successful.

— Avery Hamel

There was still a collapse in September, but this one was more due to massive injuries that just became too much to carry. They dumped Rafael Devers for a one-year solution which could be bad if/when Bregman leaves. Kristian Campbell, Marcelo Mayer, and Roman Anthony were a mixed bag of lost at the plate/hurt/and superstar. The rotation was worrying entering the season, Tanner Houck left a gaping hole that won’t be filled by him in 2026 either, and none of the injured guys returned as reinforcements (though history is kinda squishy on whether or not Giolito was injured in March; I feel like not).

There is a lot to build on, but it also felt like there were a lot of areas where the Sox were a little asleep at the wheel. It seems like it was a success, but if they drop down again in 2026, then it’ll reveal itself as a mirage instead of what we all want: an real step forward.

—Mike Carlucci

A very complicated question but I lean towards no. Being down to their fourteenth or fifteenth starting pitcher by season’s end was certainly a tough break, and you could argue that making the playoffs with the roster they had left in September, sans Roman Anthony, was impressive. But, in a wide-open American League, the team took a lot of half-measures at the start of their contention window. They were aggressive in acquiring Garrett Crochet, Alex Bregman, and Aroldis Chapman. At the same time, they dealt Devers at a high point in the season and waited too long to call up Roman Anthony and Marcelo Mayer, specifically Anthony who was held down until June 9 in what certainly felt like service time manipulation to prevent him from finishing top-2 in the MVP voting and losing a season of control. With Anthony and Mayer hurt, and Campbell in the minors, none of the “Big Three” prospects got a lick of playoff experience.

—Bob Osgood

Well…they made the postseason after the ignominy of the last four years. Put one in the plus column. But they didn’t adapt to changing conditions (the weak AL East) in-season and that goes in the minus column. The front office should have pounced in several different ways to make something happen while we were uniquely positioned to do so. Improvement isn’t quite the same as success, and success wasn’t the word coming out of my mouth while watching our offense flame out in Game 3 of the Wild Card Series.

—Maura McGurk

It was a step in the right direction, but not a success. I know only one team wins the World Series, but winning it all is a success, and anything else is not.

— Jacob Roy

I used to say that, as long as a team plays meaningful baseball games in September, then the season was a success. And while I still like the sound of that, I’m not sure it remains true anymore.

The expanded and watered-down playoff system is disincentivizing most organizations from trying to build truly great teams. You used to need to aim for over 95 wins to hope to have a chance at winning the World Series. Now that number is down to about 86 and, as long as you’re hovering around .500 at the start of September, then you can still claim to be in the hunt.

I hate this and am convinced it’s terrible for the long-term health of the sport. But I don’t have a say in how things are run. The owners do and they love this system, particularly owners like Fenway Sports Group, who are interested in winning only to the extent that they can win as cost efficiently as possible. Thus, I have no doubt that FSG is pretty content with how things went down in 2025 — they were able to make the playoffs and sell-out the ballpark while also dumping a long-term contract and carrying just the 12-highest payroll in baseball.

But I’m under no obligation to accept their definition of the word success, nor am I under any obligation to adhere to any of my old definitions of the word, either. So I’m going to change things up a bit. To me, success is now a more nebulous concept, not necessarily defined solely by wins. Rather, I’ll define success as an organization doing everything it can to try to win within reason, and then doing so. I don’t believe that the 2025 Red Sox as an organization did everything they could to put a winning team on the field, and I don’t believe that merely aiming for 86-90 wins is ever acceptable.

— Dan Secatore

If we’re allowed to cheat a bit, the answer here is both yes and no. It was a success in the macro, but a failure in the micro. The reason there was so much energy and hope around the 2025 team this summer is because the overall trajectory of the club is pointed in such a positive direction.

However, if you look under the hood, the engine behind that trajectory is heavily tied to the tsunami of young talent who major league debuts this year including Roman Anthony, Marcelo Mayer, Kristian Campbell, Hunter Dobbins, Jhostynxon Garcia, Connelly Early, and Payton Tolle. All that shine coming up in the same season (maybe the most exciting crop of Red Sox talent to ever debut in a single year) is absolutely a success story for the franchise, and it’s also a huge reason why you should feel as good about the Red Sox going into 2026 and beyond than you have about any stretch of years with this team since the end of the last decade.

However, if we’re boiling down what the 2025 Red Sox did with this incoming tide of young talent, the individual season is a failure. Through a combination of injury and growing pains, most of the young guys mentioned played no part in the final couple weeks of the season, the lack of moves made at the deadline ensured the team was way too thin to advance beyond the Wild Card round.

Now, many people would call just making the playoffs a success, and I used to be one of them. But now that MLB has bloated the playoff structure, playoff games AT FENWAY PARK needs to be the new bar here. This means either finishing as one of the top four seeds, or winning at least one playoff series at the 5 or 6 seed. I’m not lowering my standards just because MLB did.