The Roster Is Full. The Excuses Shouldn’t Be.

The Red Sox spent Monday collecting award nominations and rearranging the roster. One tells us there is talent worth building around. The other tells us somebody in baseball operations knows what day it is.

Congratulations on meeting the deadline. Please hold the duck boats.

As Boston moves into November, the assignment is getting clearer: give the people who earned recognition a better team to work with. A full roster is a head count. A complete roster is something Craig Breslow still has to build.

Monday’s BBWAA announcement put Chad Tracy among the American League Manager of the Year finalists and Payton Tolle among the AL Rookie of the Year finalists. Tracy joins Kevin Cash and Will Venable; Tolle joins Kevin McGonigle and Parker Messick.

These are finalist selections, not victories. Rookie of the Year will be announced November 9 and Manager of the Year November 10, both at 7 p.m. Eastern on MLB Network. Voting took place before the postseason.

That last detail matters. These awards evaluate the regular season. They are not a referendum on how miserable you felt when Boston’s season ended.

The Globe’s Tim Healey reports that Boston went 77–58 under Tracy, while Tolle finished with a 3.03 ERA and 171 strikeouts in 148⅔ innings over 26 starts.

That is real work. You can be furious about the ending and still recognize that somebody kept the season from becoming six months of arguing with your television.

My concern is what comes next. A manager’s ability to squeeze more out of a roster should not become an invitation to hand him less. And a young starter’s success should encourage the front office to surround him with dependable pitching, rather than treating his emergence as a coupon.

Development is supposed to make a contender better. It should not become…