ST. PETERSBURG -- The sting of a 5-1 loss to the Rays on Sunday didn’t last long for the Red Sox.
Not long after, the Braves beat the Astros, officially punching Boston’s ticket to the playoffs as one of the AL’s three Wild Card teams.
It’s a postseason appearance few saw coming when the Sox started the season 32-46. Not only are they the first team in history to advance to finish above .500 after losing as many as 32 of their first 78 games, but now they have a postseason berth to go with it.
Currently sitting as the No. 5 seed, the Red Sox are most likely to open their playoff run with a best-of-three Wild Card Series at Yankee Stadium, starting on Sept. 29. It would be a rematch from last year, when the Yankees won in three games after the Sox had taken the opener behind a brilliant performance by Garrett Crochet.
In a bit of baseball poetry, a home run swing from Mike Yastrzemski, the grandson of Red Sox legend Carl, gave the Braves a lead they would not relinquish and helped officially push Boston into the postseason.
“When you work as hard as we have worked, it was almost July [before we got going], and to fight as hard as we did, to put ourselves in the position we did, I don’t think you care much how it gets done,” said interim manager Chad Tracy, who took over after the dismissal of Alex Cora on April 25. “You just want to see your ticket get punched.”
For several weeks, the Red Sox never stopped punching. The road back to contention started with a four-game sweep of the Yankees at Fenway from June 25-28.
It continued on July 3, when the Sox began what would become a winning streak of 15 games, tying the franchise record set by the 1946 pennant winners of Ted Williams, Bobby Doerr, Dom DiMaggio and Johnny Pesky.
And even after that streak was snapped, the Sox shortly thereafter ripped off another nine-game winning streak, giving them the best 30-game stretch in team history. Including the Yankees sweep that started it all, Boston was 32-5 from June 25-Aug. 7.
Just when the rabid fanbase known as Red Sox Nation thought they were losing their summer, Boston pulled off one of the most remarkable turnarounds in history, and got the first reward for that on Sunday.