Suarez extends Boston's season-high win streak to 5 with 12th straight QS

BOSTON – Letdown following the four-game sweep in the Yankees series? Hardly.

The Red Sox know that they can’t let up if they want to get back into contention.

After James Wood hit a Statcast-projected 441-foot missile to lead off the game against Ranger Suarez, the Red Sox swiftly answered in their half of the first with a four-run outburst.

An emotional Willson Contreras – his heart heavy over the recent earthquakes in Venezuela – mauled a mammoth three-run homer over everything in left and Caleb Durbin added a solo shot.

Boston (37-46) extended its season-high winning streak to five games. Here is what mattered most on Monday.

1. Pitching, pitching, pitching

It is no coincidence that the Red Sox are rolling at a time their starting rotation is on a dominant run. Suarez went six innings, allowing five hits and three runs while walking one and striking out eight.

“He's a tough at-bat from the left side,” said Nationals manager Blake Butera. “He's able to mix speeds pretty well and move the ball around the zone a ton. He doesn't leave too much over the center of the plate. When he does, there's some type of movement on it, whether it's cutting or sinking. And he kept us off-balance."

Suarez’s strong effort bumped Boston’s run of quality starts to 12 straight games, the club’s longest such stretch since a franchise-record 14 in a row from April 8-25, 1988.

During the current run, Sox starters are 7-1 with a 1.75 ERA.

2. Hitting, hitting, hitting

For a large chunk of the season, Boston put up stellar pitching efforts that went to waste because the offense wasn’t producing.

But as the weather has warmed up, so too has the Red Sox’s lineup. Monday marked the ninth time in the last 11 games that interim manager Chad Tracy’s squad scored four or more runs.

“It's kind of flying under the radar, but we're finding a way to have very competitive at-bats, and we're finding a way to get more runs early in the game and play with leads, so that matters too,” said Tracy. “And we're hitting some balls out of the ballpark, and we're driving balls in the gap. It's a pretty balanced offensive attack right now.”

3. ‘Venezuela!’

When Contreras pummeled his three-run blast in the first inning, he flipped his bat high in the air, started his trot around the bases and roared one word to his dugout.

“Venezuela!”

Contreras is one of five Venezuelans on the Red Sox.

“Obviously, it’s very hard to be here when you want to be out there physically trying to help,” said Suarez, who also played for Venezuela in this spring’s World Baseball Classic. “But at the end of the day, we're trying to do our best to try to support them. And also, I just want to send my best wishes forward for my people over there in Venezuela, and to let them know that they're not alone.”