The scene reads like a spy movie set in a minor league stadium: bottom of the fourth inning in Worcester's Polar Park, and the manager is quietly informed that he needs to walk into the tunnel -- but be careful not to raise suspicions. He is handed a phone -- his is back in his office -- and told by the caller to retreat there, close the door and use his own phone to make another call. He is given no clues, only instructions. It was all very clandestine, maybe unnecessarily so, but Chad Tracy did as he was told. He stood in the tunnel, ended the call with Boston Red Sox farm director Brian Abraham, handed the phone back to mental-skills coach Jake Chaplin, walked up the tunnel to the clubhouse, and then his office, and closed the door. Out on the field, Worcester catcher Mickey Gasper, now a budding Boston folk hero, looked around and wondered where the hell his manager went.

"Middle of the game, and he's not in the dugout," Gasper says now. "I was confused, like, 'Hey guys, where's our manager? Anybody seen our manager?'" As instructed, Tracy had called his boss, Craig Breslow, the team's chief baseball officer. Breslow told him the team had fired manager Alex Cora and five other coaches. Tracy was chosen to take over for Cora, starting the next day, April 26, in Baltimore. Tracy digested the news and collapsed into his chair. At 40, he had reached the pinnacle of his profession, one of 30 jobs in the whole world, and among the many thoughts that swirled through his mind, one carried the clearest signal: Is it OK to be happy?

"You could work 20 years at this and never get this chance," Tracy said this week, sitting in the third-base dugout at Globe Life Field in Arlington. "I was playing that mental juggle: sad for my counterparts and friends who just lost their jobs, and ecstatic for the opportunity ahead of me." He didn't have time to strategize; he just flew to Baltimore to manage his first game and, on the way there, tried to outline a plan. The Red Sox were a mess (or he wouldn't have been there). He knew he had to address the team and the newly reconfigured staff. He knew that communication with some veteran players had been fractured by Cora's managerial style, so there were individual meetings that needed to take place. He stood in front of the team that Sunday morning, barely 15 hours after plopping into his office chair, and looked out at 26 frustrated ballplayers. They were 10-17, and they were frustrated -- which Tracy took as a good sign, because frustration is far better than acceptance. He figured he had five minutes to find the right words, or at least avoid the wrong ones, because even though he'd managed many of them before in Triple-A, this was something completely different.

"I'm not here to kick the door down," he told them. "I'm not going to bum-rush in here and start changing everything. I'm here to help." He said nothing about baseball. "Not about our record," he said last week, "not about X's and O's, not about fundamentals, not about bunting. None of that." Tracy has an unintimidating, friendly look but a surprisingly commanding voice. The brim of his cap settles in around brow height, as if it's a quarter-size too big, and his close-cropped beard makes him look like he popped out of an outdoors catalog. "I told myself, 'Make sure you leave the room and everybody is like, ahh'" -- here he stops, breathes in and lets loose a heavy sigh before continuing. "If I could get them to just breathe that sigh of relief and say, 'It's going to take time, but we'll be OK.' That was what that meeting was about for me." As he walked away, sensing he had succeeded, he knew a tougher task lay ahead: trying to convince 26 guys to believe that a team that had done nothing could accomplish anything. IT DIDN'T HAPPEN immediately, or even particularly quickly. In late J...