BOSTON — Chad Tracy is an attention-to-detail kind of guy, which helps explain why the Boston Red Sox liberated him from Triple-A obscurity in April to be their interim manager after Alex Cora was let go. And yet it all happened so fast, so abruptly, that even now, more than four months later, details-guy Tracy has a hard time remembering some of the little details that’ll come in handy if he ever decides to write a book about this wild ride of a Red Sox season.“Like, I remember being in a van, but I have no recollection of what kind of van it was,” Tracy said Wednesday afternoon at Fenway Park, a couple of hours before the Red Sox closed out a brief homestand with an 8-3 loss to the Seattle Mariners. “The way it all happened, I guess I didn’t get a chance to take it all in.”With the Red Sox headed to Baltimore on Thursday to begin a four-game series against the Orioles, Tracy is going to get that chance. For it was on Sunday, April 26, at Camden Yards that the Red Sox registered a 5-3 victory over the Orioles in Tracy’s debut as interim manager. At the time, he was viewed as a caretaker, as the good-soldier manager of the Worcester Red Sox whose new job — that is, assignment — was to run the big club until Craig Breslow, Boston’s chief baseball officer, could decide on a full-time manager. But then the Red Sox went 21-4 in July, including a franchise record-tying 15-game winning streak, and because of that, they are likely headed to the playoffs. Also likely is that the “interim” sign will be removed from Tracy’s title once this season is over, however it ends, wherever it ends. It would be criminal at this point for Tracy not to get the gig full-time.That’s what makes this trip to Baltimore by the Red Sox so intriguing. When the Sox were at Camden Yards in April, Tracy had to be guided to the manager’s office. Now he’s coming back as the manager who’s guiding the surprise-package Red Sox to the postseason.True, Tracy’s return isn’t going to be the big local story. Orioles fans will be welcoming back catcher Adley Rutschman, who just a few years ago was the rookie centerpiece of an Orioles rebuild. Acquired by the Red Sox last month, the hope is that his bat will bring needed thump to the lineup. Orioles fans don’t care about any of that. They just want to say hi to an old friend.But make no mistake: Tracy is looking forward to this return to Camden Yards, if only to take in some of the trappings of Baltimore he was too overwhelmed to appreciate the last time.“I’m actually looking forward to seeing it because much of what happened there (before), it’s hard to even remember,” Tracy said. “I was in the hotel, but I didn’t really see the hotel. It was all just moving so quick. “And then there’s that first day, I got my first major-league win as a manager, but there was so much going on that in that moment it was hard to enjoy it,” he said. “So, yeah, nothing crazy emotional, but I think it will be cool to actually go back and be able to take it in more than I did last time.”He was asked if something he sees — a chair, a picture, a clock — will bring it all back to him.“I think all of it will,” Tracy said. “I do remember walking into the hotel and seeing the lobby. I remember that. I remember thinking that, man, that’s going to hit me when I walk in there. The lobby.”Baseball’s Most Baffling BlunderJoe CrisalliThere’s something really cool about a hotel lobby providing Tracy his real big-league memory. This is a guy who never played in the big leagues, had never so much as coached in the big leagues. He presumably had had a taste of the big leagues because his father, Jim Tracy, was himself a big-league manager. But that’s a family memory, not a big-league memory. The fact is that Chad Tracy had spent all of his baseball career in minor-league hotels. Those places aren’t the dumps they used to be, but they’re not the palaces that are a way of life for big-league teams.Tracy is sufficiently savvy to know the difference. And he anticipated it. It’s such an honest, from-the-gut revelation, and we can all relate.When Tracy arrived at the hotel on that late Saturday night, he was greeted by José David Flores, a Red Sox coach who was not included in the purge that saw Cora and five of his assistants dismissed. A few years earlier, Flores had been on the Worcester coaching staff when Tracy was managing the WooSox. Now Flores would be working under Tracy on the Boston staff.“I met Flo in the lobby,” Tracy said. “We had a drink and talked through some things for the next day.”Now he’s returning to Baltimore. To that hotel. To that lobby. “That will hit home for me, for sure,” Tracy said. “The last time, all of that was about a seven-hour window from arriving there and then getting on the bus the next morning for a day game. A lot of that is going to rush back, for sure.”Orioles fans will be wild about Rutschman on Thursday night. As for Tracy, it’s likely many Orioles fans wouldn’t be able to pick him out of a lineup. And that’s OK. Tracy isn’t returning to Baltimore for the cheers. He’s there for the chairs. The couches. The artwork. And all the other glitz of a big-league hotel lobby. For those who’ve watched “Field of Dreams” — and come on, who hasn’t? — there’s a line in which Ray Liotta’s Shoeless Joe Jackson reminisces about life on the road: “I used to love traveling on the trains from town to town. The hotels … brass spittoons in the lobbies, brass beds in the rooms.”The spittoons are gone, and teams don’t travel much by rail anymore, but you get the idea. Big-leaguers get big-league hotel lobbies, something that Chad Tracy anticipated before he even walked into one.