Craig Breslow Describes Why Sonny Gray Is Different From Walker Buehler

Almost as soon as the Boston Red Sox traded for Sonny Gray, there were Red Sox fans expressing fears that Gray in 2026 could be a repeat of 2025 Walker Buehler — a veteran right-hander signed to a one-year, $20 million-ish deal who ends up flopping.

And while those concerns come from an understandable place, alongside worries about Gray’s advanced age (36), these are two completely different pitchers, and their arrivals in Boston aren’t as comparable as many assume.

Red Sox chief baseball officer Craig Breslow actually acknowledged the Buehler-Gray comparison recently, as MLB.com’s Ian Browne wrote about on Saturday.

“Obviously we had Walker here last year,” Breslow said, per Browne. “I don’t think anyone would say that it worked out as well as we had hoped. But Sonny, he’s got a pretty significant track record of not only performance and consistency, but of shouldering a pretty significant workload. I think two out of the last three years he’s thrown 180-plus innings with what I would call impeccable command. I think they’re fairly different, and we obviously made decisions in each of those cases to go forward with the players. And hopefully the Sonny acquisition works out.”

Durability is the massive difference between Gray and Buehler. Gray hasn’t pitched less than 166 innings in any of the last three seasons. Buehler came to the Red Sox following multiple years of injuries. He stepped up big-time in the 2024 World Series for the Los Angeles Dodgers, which did much to mask his inconsistency over the past few years in the eyes of free-agent suitors a month or two later.

But the Buehler that the Red Sox got in 2024 was the inconsistent Buehler, not the 2024 World Series version.

Gray comes to the Red Sox with a much better track record for durability and consistency, and that’s where the comparison pretty much falls flat.