BOSTON — In each of the last three seasons, Sam Kennedy took the podium for the Red Sox’s year-end press conference and attempted to explain why his club had once again fallen short of its goal to reach the postseason.

While the end came sooner and more abruptly than anyone would have hoped, this year the Red Sox president and CEO was finally able to speak about real progress being made.

“We took a step in the right direction in 2025,” Kennedy said. “We’re all really excited about the road ahead.”

The 2025 Red Sox season marked a return to form for an organization that has spent the better part of five years rebuilding and retooling. The club reached the postseason for the first time since 2021, overcoming a litany of injuries and setbacks to finish third in the AL East and earning a date with the New York Yankees in the AL wild-card round.

Boston also got contributions from a variety of young players. Some, like Roman Anthony, have been highly touted for years. Others, like Connelly Early, essentially came out of nowhere, and manager Alex Cora said the strides made in pitching development played the biggest role in the club’s success.

“The thing that excites me is the pitching, going into the offseason and we had some guys last year that we thought were going to be better — Tanner (Houck), Kutter (Crawford), they were banged up — but what we have in player development now is real,” Cora said. “Going into the offseason last year we were talking about position players and I was like ‘ok cool that’s great but we have some good position players here.’ Now we’re talking about a deeper pitching staff, which is very important.”

But the Red Sox top decision-makers also recognize there is still lots of progress to be made.

“We’re sitting here in the first week of October, which means we didn’t accomplish what we set out to accomplish,” chief baseball officer Craig Breslow said. “We talked all offseason and during the season about building a roster that was capable of a deep postseason run, and we fell short of that.”

Breslow laid out several areas of improvement for the club to make heading into 2026. He pointed out that while the club boasts the best defensive outfield in baseball, the Red Sox also led the league in errors. While the offense ranked seventh in MLB in runs per game, the club often struggled with runners in scoring position and lacked power at the end.

How can the Red Sox improve? Breslow wasn’t forthcoming when pressed for specifics, including when asked about the futures of Alex Bregman and Trevor Story or the roles of players like Triston Casas and Masataka Yoshida. He repeatedly offered the same response of “we want to improve the team,” or something along those lines.

But Breslow did make one comment that should encourage Red Sox fans.

“There’s no guarantee that we just pick up where we left off at the end of 2025, just expecting everyone to take a step forward I think could allow us to be complacent or fall flat,” Breslow said. “We’ll take stock of the roster and we’ll think about opportunities to improve and that could come from multiple paths.”

That point about complacency is key.

It would be easy for the Red Sox to justify running things back and counting on their young players to make the leap, but there are no shortage of cautionary tales around the game where clubs have taken a similar approach and got burned.

Just look at this past season’s Baltimore Orioles.

This time last year the Orioles had arguably the brightest future of any club in the game. Baltimore had emerged from a long and painful rebuild to make the playoffs in back-to-back years. They had an emerging young core with loads of top prospects still on the way, and now they had a new billionaire owner who could elevate the franchise from one of the cheapest in MLB to one capable of spending with the best.

But what did Baltimore do next? Not much, and when the season began it was immediately evident their pitching staff wasn’t up to par and their burgeoning young core wasn’t quite ready to carry the load.

They crashed into last place, and if the Red Sox aren’t careful the same thing could happen to them.

Roman Anthony, Marcelo Mayer or Casas could get hurt again. Some of the young pitchers could regress. Bregman or Story could opt out and sign elsewhere, leaving a void that could be difficult for the front office to fill.

When you have a chance to win, like the Red Sox do, you can’t take anything for granted.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what the Red Sox need to do this offseason. They need another frontline starter to pair with Garrett Crochet at the top of the rotation. They need a power bat to bolster the heart of the lineup. They need to solve their outfield logjam so that all of their best players can take the field at once without having to stick a Gold Glove-caliber player like Ceddanne Rafaela at second base.

Most importantly, they need buy-in from ownership. That hasn’t always been there in the past, but with “the future” finally here, Breslow says he’s confident he’ll have the support necessary to take the Red Sox to the next level.

“What I have seen as a player and what I’ve seen over the last couple of years is with this ownership group, when there is a chance to build a winner and a team that can contend for the postseason, resources aren’t a problem,” Breslow said. “I think we’ve talked a lot about how this window of contention is upon us.”

Now the Red Sox owe it to themselves and their fans to seize the moment, otherwise this step forward could wind up being the first step down a path to nowhere.

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