Sonny Gray and the Yankees 'bump'
Sonny Gray is having an exceptional season for the Red Sox – he’s 18-5 with a 2.72 ERA – and is Boston’s scheduled starter for Game 2 on Wednesday. It’s the kind of season the Yankees expected to get from him when they acquired him at 2017 trade deadline from Oakland for three prospects.
Instead, Gray – who’d been a front-of-the-rotation guy with the A’s – was so disappointing it still makes Yankees fans wince to hear his name.
He was 4-7 with a 3.72 ERA down the stretch of 2017, but his first full season was just plain bad. Gray ended up with an 11-9 record, but pitched 130 2/3 innings to a 4.90 ERA, lost his spot in the starting rotation and was left off the roster for the postseason.
“It's kind of like one of those things that you have a snowball . . . that kind of starts rolling down a hill,” Gray said of things not working out in New York. “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. The bigger the snowball gets, the harder it is to stop it or take a step back.”
While the season was unfolding, Gray often looked like a deer in the headlights when talking to the media after appearances. The Yankees traded him to the Reds after the season.
“It took me to get away and get myself into a different environment [to] reflect on those things . . . and that took some time,” Gray said. “I do know that playing here made me a stronger person, . . . a better pitcher, a better baseball player.
"There's a lot of players that can have one bump in the road and not get back on the tracks,” he added. “And for me, there's been bumps along the way and that may have been a little bit of a bigger bump than others.”
Roger Rubin returned to Newsday in 2018 to write about high schools, colleges and baseball following 20 years at the Daily News. A Baseball Hall of Fame voter since 2011, he has covered 13 MLB postseasons and 14 NCAA Final Fours.
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