Netflix's 'The Clubhouse' offers a savvy Red Sox brand relaunch

Whenever a documentary touts that they’ve been granted access to areas that are typically off-limits, you’ve got to wonder what’s in it for the organization doing the granting. In the case of Netflix’s new limited series “The Clubhouse: A Year with the Red Sox,” the peek behind the scenes of a floundering Major League Baseball team is a shrewd public relations move for a franchise that honestly didn’t have much to lose.

After winning four World Series titles between 2004 and 2018, the Sox have finished last in their division three of the past five years. These days, not even the team’s owners seem particularly interested in what’s happening on Jersey Street, making miserly personnel moves that can’t help but feel insulting considering how Fenway is the most expensive ballpark to visit in the entire country. (A trip for a family of four averages around $400. To see a last-place team.) The 2024 season chronicled in this series was the first time since the 1990s that I can’t recall watching a single game.

Look at “The Clubhouse” as a savvy brand relaunch, with the Red Sox enlisting Netflix to help reintroduce themselves to disgruntled fans. The highly touted “unprecedented” access mostly means they’ve left the f-bombs in, with cameras in the dugout and the clubhouse catching players in appealingly relaxed, if not exactly revelatory situations. Like a lot of streaming series, it’s somewhere between a documentary and a reality show, leaning more toward the reality show side than I personally would have preferred. It’s an enjoyable, smoothly produced program, though interest levels may vary when it comes to watching an underfunded, injury-prone team fight and claw their way to the middle of the standings.

Every episode picks a protagonist we follow for the hour, building up to a big game — usually against the Yankees — during which their mettle is tested. It’s neat to see the park from angles we don’t get on NESN, and the players are miked so we can hear what they’re muttering out there on the field. (It’s usually either in Spanish or begins with the letter “F.”) This is an extremely young and inexperienced team — we’re told that 22 out of 26 on the roster have been playing professionally for less than three years — and manager Alex Cora serves as a soothing, paternal figure for a lot of them.

Cora seems like such a cool, easygoing guy, you understand why fans and the baseball brass — not to mention the filmmakers — would be inclined to breeze by that whole cheating thing for which he served a one-year suspension in 2020. Still, it’s downright shocking in this day and age to see someone so frankly cop to having done something wrong without making any excuses for himself. Cora comes off as a straight-shooter who approaches every situation with an unflappable understanding that things could be better or a whole lot worse. (He’s also a smart enough politician not to complain on camera about the front office’s austerity measures.) You watch the show and want to play for him.

Cora’s got his hands full with Jarren Duran, the closest thing “The Clubhouse” has to a main character. The 28-year-old outfielder had a terrible rookie season in 2021, when a few embarrassing errors made him a laughingstock to some of the most famously unforgiving fans in baseball. He’s refreshingly honest here about his mental health struggles and imposter syndrome, opening up to the cameras about a suicide attempt I don’t recall seeing reported before. Duran’s doing much better these days, writing the words “F--- ‘Em”  and “Still Alive” on his wrist tape before every game and putting up stats that become the highlights of this otherwise underwhelming season. One gets the sense he could become a superstar, if the pressure doesn’t get to him.

Duran’s intensity pairs well with eccentric first baseman Triston Casas, a gangly, 25-year-old oddball who likes to roll around on the grass half-naked during practice and paints his fingernails to get a rise out of people. An early segment during which Duran’s truck breaks down on Lansdowne Street and these hapless two try to fix it in front of fans is the kind of screwy side adventure “The Clubhouse” needed more of. Too bad a rib cartilage injury sidelines Casas for most of the season, because the show could have used more of his off-kilter energy. (Also, the Sox could have used his bat.)

Director Greg Whiteley has a shelf full of Emmys for shows like this and he’s got the sports doc formula down to a science. When an episode begins with Duran signing autographs for young fans and talking about the importance of being a good role model for children, you know we’re only minutes away from his two-game suspension for shouting a homophobic slur at a heckler in the stands. As with so many nonfiction shows, the footage has been endlessly finessed with manipulative music and dramatic slow motion according to each episode’s ordained storylines. These “documentaries” are more designed than documented.

What I enjoyed most were little vignettes with the folks on the periphery of Fenway Park, like the Green Monster scoreboard operators who offer cutting commentary while watching the game through little eye slats in the wall. I was fascinated by the New Jersey mud farmer whose crops are dutifully rubbed into new baseballs by hard-working employees, and we honestly could have spent a whole episode in the budget office, going over some frankly staggering numbers. (The Sox spend $490,000 a year on balls. Yet they still won’t buy a bullpen. Go figure.)

Announcer Joe Castiglione’s emotional farewell after 42 years in the booth arrives in the eighth episode, and probably would have packed more of a punch if we’d spent any time with him in previous installments. Since there’s not going to be a satisfying climax on the field, the final hour starts pulling in characters from older Red Sox lore, like legendary pitcher and “Eephus” co-star Bill “Spaceman” Lee holding court at a party. (“I go to the concert and they give me four hits of psilocybin, I had like five beers and then they pass a joint around…” I will never forgive the filmmakers for cutting away in the middle of this story.)  And you probably already guessed we weren’t getting through this without sportswriters Dan Shaughnessy and Bob Ryan harrumphing about how much they hate “Sweet Caroline.”

The Red Sox are having a bit of an identity crisis at the moment. MassLive columnist Sean McAdam, who serves as something like a Greek chorus for the series, notes that the team has gone from being defined by failure to haunted by past successes. As someone who grew up under “the Curse of the Bambino,” I can bore you with stories of my dad letting me stay up late to watch the ball roll between Bill Buckner’s legs in the 1986 World Series, or exactly where I was sitting in a long gone Waltham bar when Aaron Boone hit that home run to clinch the pennant for the Yankees in 2003. But such tales of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory lose their masochistic allure after four World Series wins. There’s no longer a perverse honor in being losers.

“The Clubhouse” is a transparent attempt to rebrand this $4.8 billion skinflint franchise as a bunch of scrappy young underdogs worth rooting for. It’s obvious what the organization is trying to do here. Yet spending time with these charismatic players and looking at that beautiful ballpark for eight hours had me scanning StubHub as soon as the final episode was over. In other words, it worked. Play ball.

“The Clubhouse: A Year with the Red Sox” starts streaming on Netflix on Tuesday, April 8.