On Monday, Greg Whiteley, the director of the new Netflix docuseries centered around the 2024 Boston Red Sox, The Clubhouse: A Year with the Boston Red Sox, discussed some challenges that came with the process of filming. Perhaps at the very top of that list was an underestimate of the budget it would take to film the 2024 MLB season in its entirety.
Ahead of the premiere of the docuseries on Tuesday, Whiteley spoke with Chris Cotillo and Sean McAdam, the hosts of The Fenway Rundown podcast, to discuss how filming went.
One topic that came up from Cotillo and McAdam, who have plenty of insight into the team as beat reporters, was how filming was put on pause down the stretch of the 2024 MLB season, only for cameras to return for the end of the season. By the time they did, the Red Sox were largely out of the American League playoff picture.
When asked about this, Whiteley detailed how this was due to more of their budget for the docuseries being spent on following the team during Spring Training than was previously anticipated.
“I’m glad that we get the chance to talk about this,” said Whiteley. “There was a budget that Netflix asked us for. And over the years, we have become better and better at being able to predict it. We even pad it a little bit. So we gave Netflix the budget and said, ‘This is what we think we can do it for.’ But it didn’t account at the time for filming all of spring training. Alex Cora, after the budget had been approved, pulled me aside and said, ‘Hey, you need to be here for all of spring training.’ I think the budget accounted for us being there for two weeks. He said, ‘No, that’s what you need to be there for. That is where you get to know the players and that’s when they get to know you. You have got to invest in that time.’
“He was 100 percent right. So we filmed everything but a week of spring training. It was exactly the right thing to do, even though not all of that footage is gonna end up there. It still afforded us the time to just hang out with the players and have them get comfortable with how we would be filming. But I just thought at some point we would have to make this up. I just didn’t know when. The season was always interesting because even when the team was in a funk, you still had a player you were following that was doing really interesting stuff. You could never predict when someone was going to get injured. When was somebody going to go 5 for 5? When was somebody going to break the home run streak? You needed to be there for that stuff.
“We simply looked at… Unless we take some time off to make up for the money we spent in spring training, we were going to miss the end of the season. And we all knew we couldn’t miss that. Regardless of how the season turned out, we knew we couldn’t miss the end. So we took a little break.”
Some fascinating stuff here from Greg Whiteley explaining the Netflix budget controversy from last summer and Alex Cora using it as motivation down the stretch for the Red Sox.
“Even Netflix has quit on you guys!” pic.twitter.com/1CxdIZMYjG
— Chris Cotillo (@ChrisCotillo) April 7, 2025
Whiteley then explained that once they returned to film the end of the season, players briefly appeared to resent those working on the docuseries for leaving, which he believes stems from Red Sox manager Alex Cora using their departure as motivation for the team during their poor stretch of play.
“An interesting thing happened,” Whiteley added. “When we left, the team went into a funk. You would have to ask Alex (Cora) about this. I don’t want him to get angry with me. But my sense is that Alex kind of used us as motivation. ‘Even Netflix has quit on you guys! But I’m not going to quit on you and you can’t quit on you.’ So the team kind of got fired up. And by the time we got back, they were kinda pissed at us. It took about 48 hours. I was really worried for about 48 hours. Like, oh my gosh, nobody is gonna take a mic. We’re gonna film the rest of the season and nobody will talk to us. And then things kind of relaxed.”
We’ve certainly seen other coaches who have had their team filmed on shows like HBO’s Hard Knocks use the platform as motivation for players in the past. So it makes sense for Cora to try and help his players break a losing skid in this way.
Either way, it will be interesting to see whether there are any signs of the animosity that Whiteley was speaking about when the eight-episode docuseries premieres on Tuesday.
