‘The Clubhouse: A Year With the Red Sox’ Review: Solid Netflix Doc

If you’re developing a personality based around sports fandom, it’s easiest and most satisfying to root for either a perennial loser or a perennial winner. Cheer for the scrappy underdog and you can maintain a perpetual chip on your shoulder, while avoiding accusations of bandwagon-jumping or front-running. Cheer for the all-powerful behemoth and you can maintain an attitude of superiority, mitigating the fact that everybody else hates you with constant opportunities for celebration.

It’s a lot harder to get pumped up to support a .500 team, devoting your passion to a pursuit with seemingly few highs and few lows, neither exceptional nor pathetic, constantly in tepid flux.

The idea that there’s no drama in mediocrity is swiftly and efficiently defused in Greg Whiteley‘s The Clubhouse: A Year With the Red Sox, an eight-part documentary series focusing on the 2024 Boston Red Sox, a team that finished 81-81.

It was a team that, as most Red Sox fans remember (it was only last year, after all), as incredibly disappointing. Or incredibly encouraging. Or both. If you’d told Red Sox Nation — a fandom that has experienced a transition from sympathetic long-suffering martyrdom to insufferably entitled back to unsympathetically short-suffering in the past two decades — before the season that the 2024 team would finish at .500 and that several young players would show growth, it would have been enthusiastically accepted. If you’d told Red Sox fans at a helium-inflated midseason that the team would end up at .500 and that its best player would be suspended for homophobic slurs, there would have been misery.

Being a sports fan is all a matter of moment-to-moment perspective.

Few storytellers understand this as well as Whiteley, television’s dean of long-form sports documentaries with the Last Chance U football and basketball editions, Cheer, Wrestlers and, most recently, America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys. Time and time again, Whitley has proven his ability to craft individual personal narratives set against a backdrop of the long season of a team sport.

With The Clubhouse, made with the participation of MLB Studios, Whiteley’s One Potato Productions crew offers a series that probably will appeal primarily to Red Sox fans; the Sox have developed one of those polarizing bases where if you don’t like them, you probably respond to even hints of a Boston accent or the opening notes of “Sweet Caroline” with visceral repulsion.

That needn’t be the case, though, because The Clubhouse doesn’t require a rooting interest. After all, this Red Sox team does not end up winning the World Series, so it’s as viable to root for the squad to go down in flames. It’s a show with some frustrating flaws, but overall its access and Whiteley’s narrative instincts capture one great story after another in ways that are insightful, emotional and fairly funny.

It wasn’t a World Series season for the Sox, but it was a season of transition. Craig Breslow, Yale-educated and a longtime pro, was newly hired in the job as chief baseball officer, tasked with reversing a multi-year trend to the bottom of the American League East. Alex Cora was on a one-year contract as the Red Sox manager, beloved in the clubhouse but still reviled in many corners for his participation in the Astros cheating scandal. Instead of big-name free agents and superstars, the roster was populated with up-and-coming talent including eccentric first baseman Triston Casas, ultra-intense budding superstar Jarren Duran and ascending ace Brayan Bello.

Whiteley’s access is remarkable, but not all-encompassing. Rafael Devers, the team’s biggest star, is completely absent, other than in canned highlights. Trevor Story, a big free agent signing the year before, spent most of the season nursing an injury, but he isn’t an on-camera presence even when he’s playing. The biggest new faces on the team were Japanese import Masataka Yoshida and closer Kenley Jansen, who appear mostly in the background.

None of his previous shows required Whiteley and his crew to conquer a language gap, and there’s no question that the players who speak English receive a disproportionate amount of screen time. It’s a minor irony since the Puerto Rico-born Cora’s greatest managerial asset is being bilingual and therefore able to relate across a wider swath of the clubhouse. Whiteley at least tries, and an episode in which several of the international players lament the difficulties of playing out a six-month season without access to their families, many of whom struggle to get visas, is a standout. Other than Bello, the Spanish-speaking players mostly don’t have the opportunity to develop personalities.

It isn’t fully clear if Whiteley selected his overall theme because of the players he found most available, or if he had access to Devers and Story and Yoshida but decided their contributions simply didn’t fit with his chosen throughline, which relates to the unexpected loneliness of baseball. We spend plenty of time in boisterous clubhouses and bullpens, hearing the profane banter and watching the training rituals, but where the series shines is in exposing the otherwise private moments of self-flagellation that occur after an on-field mistake. Or in showing how, when the last out is made, players spend much of their time alone.

Casas and Duran end up being the show’s key figures, both reflecting candidly on their demanding fathers and their evolving insecurities. You’d think, “Why don’t those two lonely guys just hang out more?” and perhaps my favorite scene features Duran struggling to start his beat-up old Bronco after a game and Casas desperately trying to convince him to just call AAA. But more frequently Duran is alone in his sterile Waltham apartment, while Casas walks back to the hotel where he lives after every home game.

Even the married players and coaches have to find ways to wedge their families into the season — whether it’s Tyler O’Neill taking cuts in his basement batting cage with his wife pitching and his toddler sitting just barely in safe range or Breslow trying to pay attention to his kids’ Little League game as the trade deadline is approaching.

The series builds a lot of sympathy for the showcased players, especially Duran, who is uncomfortably open recalling the pressure his father — who admits to some regrets as well — put on him and talking about his struggles with depression. The fourth episode is as revealing an hour as you’ll ever see about the mental challenges of being a professional athlete.

But if you know that Duran was the player who was disciplined for the homophobic slur, the time spent on his challenges raises the stakes for how the series will handle the incident that stained his breakout season. The answer is: “Not especially well.” Whiteley and company don’t shy from the moment that Duran calls a heckling fan the f-word mid-game and several of the non-playing talking heads — sportswriters, various Fenway employees — are unflinchingly critical.

But Duran himself, never shy about explaining or talking through anything else in the entire series, gives one canned quote about regretting that he disappointed young fans. There is no sense that Whiteley pushed him to explain how that slur came to be the thing he shouted, nor any indication that Duran or the Red Sox organization made efforts to reach out to the LGBTQ community in Boston to discuss the moment or repair the damage. The slur comes in the seventh episode, and up until that point, I was prepared to embrace Duran’s growth as a person if he and Whiteley interrogated the incident well.

I wish The Clubhouse had done somewhat better in these few ways because, overall, it does so many things well. The filming in areas that are traditional players-only is revelatory; the conversations captured are enlightening; and the profiles of people like reliever Cam Booser, who battled injuries and addiction to make his major league debut at 31, or revered radio announcer Joe Castiglione, who retired at the end of the 2024 season, are eye-opening. It all shows you don’t need a championship or an epic flameout of a season as the hook for a damn fine sports documentary.