Red Sox Pressured To DFA All-Star By Top Pod Host: 'Time Has Come'

The Boston Red Sox haven’t been managed with a cutthroat mentality in 2025, and their record reflects that.

Whether you want to blame manager Alex Cora, chief baseball officer Craig Breslow, or someone else, the overarching point here is that the singular goal of winning has been clouded in Boston’s clubhouse at times this year by confusing roster politics.

Examples 1a and 1b were of course the club’s handling of Rafael Devers’s ongoing position drama (a saga in which Devers himself was not free of blame). 

Furthermore, Boston’s handling of its ‘Big 3’ prospects — Kristian Campbell, Marcelo Mayer, and Roman Anthony — has been odd. All three players deserved to be on the roster for Opening Day, yet somehow the most heralded of the three, Anthony, remains stuck in Triple-A, despite the Red Sox underperforming offensively through 50-plus games.

When winning games is the only directive, roster decisions become clear — play your best guys, and bench your guys that have been struggling for more than a month (superstars deserve a bit more runway here, sure).

But when loyalties, promises, and other emotional dynamics with players cloud the decision-making process around roster moves, things become unnecessarily complex and less conducive to success.

Such seems to be the case with the current Trevor Story dilemma.

Story has done nothing over the past 30 games to suggest he shouldn’t be benched, given Boston’s organizational depth chart overflowing with talent.

Story has an OPS of .399 over the last 30 games (entering Tuesday), and while Cora is trying to be sensitive with his All-Star shortstop so as not to mess with him psychologically, that shouldn’t be the imperative. It matters, but not as much as winning games.

Professional baseball players are just that -- professionals, and as such, they understand that being benched or DFA’d comes with the territory of terrible performance.

On that note, on Monday, Section 10 Podcast co-host Steve Perrault wrote that Story should be designated for assignment.

“The time has come,” Perrault wrote.

“DFA Trevor Story. Let the Anthony-Mayer-Campbell trio all grow up in the big leagues together. Alex Bregman is their hitting coach. Just do it.”

Red Sox observers, Perrault among them, are tired of the team’s offense continually underperforming in 2025 despite a loaded roster.

While a full-on DFA of Story might be too intense (rather than merely benching him), the club needs to stop waiting around and assuming things will change because they have talent on paper.

From a management standpoint, the Red Sox need to stop babying their players -- stars and stud prospects alike — and simply get back to the basics of rewarding guys who are producing while taking away opportunities from those who aren’t.