BOSTON -- The All-Star break has come and gone, and the Rays are still the best team in the American League. But they ran into something even more dangerous during a long, frustrating day of baseball at Fenway Park: the hottest team in the Majors.
Getting back in the swing of things after a strong push to finish the first half, the Rays were swept by the Red Sox in a day-night doubleheader on Friday. They let one ugly inning get away from them and went down quietly at the plate in a 10-0 defeat in Game 1, then couldn’t put the Red Sox lineup away during a 5-3 defeat in Game 2.
After 18 innings that spanned more than eight and a half hours, the Rays were ready to move on.
“Tomorrow is another day. Tomorrow, come here like Opening Day and lock in, man,” Junior Caminero said. “Today, put that baseball away, and tomorrow, lock in.”
The Rays (56-40) still reside atop the AL standings, but their edge over the Yankees is only 2 1/2 games -- and the rest of the AL East still has a say, too. They have two more games this weekend against the Red Sox, who have won 11 straight and 16 of their last 18, and there’s a four-game series in Toronto on deck.
“We're getting into crunch time. We're starting off the second half with division rivals and two teams that had been, going into the break, playing very well,” veteran starter Nick Martinez said. “It's going to be a dogfight, and as we get closer to September, it's just going to get nasty.”
In the first game, the Rays were doomed by their lineup’s inability to hit Red Sox left-hander Jake Bennett, some of their own mistakes and the kind of bad bounces that always seem to accompany a hot streak like the one Boston has put together.
In the second inning, starter Griffin Jax gave up two runs on a trio of softly hit balls and a sacrifice fly. He surrendered a leadoff homer to Masataka Yoshida in the fourth, but even that came with a bit of good fortune: The ball was hit just 87 mph, with an expected batting average of .010.
“You put the ball in play, good things tend to happen sometimes,” Jax said. “I think that was ultimately what happened.”
Jax figured he could handle all that, especially with how good his swing-and-miss stuff felt while inducing 15 whiffs on the day. But the way the outing ended bothered him, as he allowed all four hitters he faced in the sixth inning to reach safely.
It didn’t get any better after Jax left the game. The Red Sox pulled off back-to-back bunt singles, one where catcher Nick Fortes was charged with a throwing error when the Rays were late to cover first base and another where Fortes unsuccessfully attempted to let the ball roll foul, and Ceddanne Rafaela punctuated the six-run inning with an RBI double off right-hander Chris Roycroft.
“They’re playing very well right now,” manager Kevin Cash said. “They created their opportunities and capitalized when they had guys on base.”
The size of the Red Sox lead hardly mattered, because the Rays barely had any baserunners to speak of during Game 1. They managed only three hits and a walk and advanced one runner to second base. Bennett was largely responsible for that, as he breezed through six innings on 65 pitches.
“We're usually an aggressive team,” shortstop Taylor Walls said. “You're going to have games where you come out aggressive, and you just catch a ball off the end, off the handle [or] you're a little late, a little early. So I think that's all it was.”
Indeed, the Rays came out swinging a few hours later. Batting with the bases loaded, Jonny DeLuca drove in two runs in the first inning of Game 2, and Caminero brushed aside any concerns about his All-Star Game hand injury by crushing his 29th home run in the third.
But the Red Sox had an answer each time.
“When you get a lead like that, you want to set a tone and be able to get that clean inning and shutdown inning,” Cash said. “We weren't able to get that.”
Wilyer Abreu and Willson Contreras blasted back-to-back homers in the first inning against right-hander Mason Englert, who was called up as the 27th man to start the nightcap, to put the Sox ahead. After Caminero’s homer, Englert surrendered another tiebreaking blast to Abreu in the third.
“That was super frustrating,” Englert said. “As a competitor there, you're definitely frustrated because you want to put up a shutdown [inning] and keep the team ahead there, so it sucks when that doesn't go your way.”