There was a time in the old days -- like a couple of months ago -- when the Red Sox were seriously scuffling. They couldn’t hold late-inning leads when their closer, Aroldis Chapman, didn’t have the ball, were losing so many one-run games that you started to lose count and were closer to last place than first. They couldn’t even score enough runs for their new ace, Garrett Crochet.
Then Alex Bregman, who had been their early-season star, got hurt. After that, maybe you heard, they traded Rafael Devers to the Giants just after the Sox were starting to show some life, having just swept the Yankees at Fenway Park. The team proceeded to go 3-6 on the West Coast trip that followed the Devers trade, came home to Fenway Park and promptly lost 9-0 to the Blue Jays on June 27.
In the process, and even beating up on some struggling teams the way they just did, the Red Sox have suddenly become as much fun to watch as any team in baseball.
Now they get an important four-game series at home against the Rays before heading into the All-Star break, before coming out of the break with series against the Cubs and Phillies on the road, then the Dodgers at Fenway. After all that, we will know a lot more about what their possibilities are heading into August and September.
For now though, kids like Roman Anthony -- he arrived from Triple-A Worcester for the Sox right before Devers left -- have breathed life into the team, season and Red Sox Nation -- and hope, something in short supply across the grind that the first few months of the season so often were. The Red Sox just got Masataka Yoshida back. They're getting Bregman back. Now the team gets a big chance to see what they can do against all the big arms on the Rays’ staff this weekend at Fenway.
Dave O’Brien, play-by-play voice on NESN, said this on Wednesday night about the Rays series:
“The place will be hopping.”
When the Sox put up 10 more runs against the Rockies on Wednesday, only two members of the batting order were over 30: Yoshida and Trevor Story, the shortstop having a solid bounce-back year after battling injuries ever since signing with Boston prior to the 2022 season. The Sox were mashing so much as they rolled through the Nats and Rockies that Alex Cora was able to give Ceddanne Rafaela, his kid center fielder who has been as hot as any of them, a night off.
“We’ve got to mix and match,” Cora said. “But that’s the way we’re going to do it. Everybody’s on board. Everybody understands what we’re all about, what we’re trying to accomplish. And there’s no complaints.”
Yoshida came out of the box with three hits against the Rockies in Boston’s 10-2 victory. Wilyer Abreu hit another home run. He now has 18 to go with 52 RBIs. Catcher Carlos Narváez, who once belonged to the Yankees and has become one of the surprise stars of his team’s season, hit another home run, raising his average to .280. Anthony raised his average to .263. Jarren Duran, who has mostly been Cora’s leadoff man, hit his eighth home run and got his RBI total to 50.
Then there is Romy Gonzalez, released by the White Sox not so very long ago. He hit a home run to help the Sox complete their sweep of the truly awful Rockies and is hitting .338 going into the Rays series.
Through it all, the Red Sox starters behind Crochet have started to show up. Lucas Giolito pitched six more shutout innings on Wednesday, lowered his ERA to 3.36 and raised his record to 6-1; this is the way he pitched when he was a kid. Brayan Bello just pitched the first nine-inning complete game of his career, and had a shutout until the ninth. At the back end of all that, of course, is the 37-year old Chapman, again as dominant a closer as there is anywhere in baseball.
And despite all the heat ownership and Craig Breslow, now running baseball operations for the Sox, took after the Devers trade, people are starting to process what Breslow accomplished in the offseason: Signed Bregman, who would have been playing in Atlanta on Tuesday night if he hadn’t gotten hurt; signed Chapman, an All-Star closer; and traded for Crochet, who has now joined Roger Clemens, Pedro Martinez and Chris Sale as the only Red Sox pitchers to have 150 or more strikeouts before the All-Star Game.
Does it all get harder now? A lot. Starting this weekend. But you know what was even harder? Watching the Sox lose all those close games in April and May and already beginning to fall out of things in the AL East. A lot has changed in a month. Now they’re hoping the real fun might just be beginning in Boston.