Before we close the book on the Red Sox historic 15-game winning streak and move on to the rest of the regular season tomorrow, I want to take a step back and marvel at what we just witnessed — because, folks, it really was nothing short of extraordinary.
If you told me at the beginning of the year that the 2026 Red Sox were going to tie the franchise record for consecutive wins at 15 straight games, I would have been delighted and surprised, but not shocked. On paper, they had some really good pieces
on this roster, and theoretically, any streak of this magnitude would have been powered by some version of the following:
- Garrett Crochet leading the charge from the top of the rotation.
- Ranger Suarez slotting in nicely and making his three turns during the streak.
- Roman Anthony becoming a superstar.
- Jarren Duran recapturing the magic of his 2024 season.
- Trevor Story finding a way to repeat 2025.
- Connelly Early or Johan Oviedo making a leap and contributing to the wins through the stretch.
- Marcelo Mayer blossoming into an everyday player and making an impact.
- The best hitter on the team all year by nearly 200 OPS points not being suspended for five games in the middle of the streak.
In reality, exactly none of those things happened. It’s crazy enough the Red Sox did this without Crochet, Anthony, Story, and Oviedo, who they’ve been missing virtually all year, but for the streak to come exactly as things got even worse is a borderline miracle. Remember, Connelly Early made his last start in that Nationals series on the final day of June and went on the IL just before all this started. Ranger Suarez did make one start early in the streak against the Angels, but he left in the third inning, which basically turned that game into an unexpected bullpen night.
In other words, as ridiculous as this Red Sox team going on a heater would have sounded in late June, the one way you kind of sort of could have seen it happening would have been on the back of their excellent rotation. And while numbers wise that’s mostly what happened, doing it with right as Early and Suarez went on the shelf is truly next level stuff, venturing into uncharred waters in bizzarro world.
(Random side note here: Ranger Suarez getting sick and not being able to come off the IL last night probably did cost the Sox win No. 16. By all accounts, his groin injury was healed and he was ready to come back, but an illness delayed his return until this weekend. If he doesn’t get sick, there’s a 99.9% chance he delivers a much more competitive outing than Eduardo Rivera gave us last night, And given the buzz in the crowd and the fact that it was also Venezuela Celebration night at Fenway Park, there’s a decent chance the Red Sox find a way to pull that one out with a starter from Venezuela making a comeback and rocking a strong outing on the mound.)
Getting great pitching with a depleted rotation is one thing, but it only gets more amazing when you step back and realize the Red Sox managed to win 15 games in a row with Willson Contreras suspended for five games in the middle of it.
Do you know where the Red Sox rank as a team in home runs this year in the American League? That would be dead last. So when you take Contreras, who has been by far the best bat throughout the 2026 season, out of the lineup, it should’ve resulted in disaster. Instead, the Sox averaged five runs per game through that stretch and got random contributions from guys all over the lineup.
You’d also think that maybe Jarren Duran, who has been productive in the past and shown brief power explosions within his dreadful 2026 season would’ve covered some of that gap. Instead, he batted .170 with a .569 OPS during the 15-game streak, and .125 with a .336 OPS during the five games Contreras was out. Seriously, how the hell did the Sox win all this games?!?
Even once Contreras did come back, they were still winning in highly improbable fashion. This includes their biggest comeback of the entire season Saturday against the Rays, and the fact that during each of the last four games of the streak, the Sox got outhit by their opponent. In order to make this work, they had to go from a team that was getting none of the hits in high leverage situations early in the season, to a team getting seemingly all of the hits in high leverage situations. No one guy stood out, and that’s probably why it worked so well.
Whoever you want to credit most, this team deserves an immense amount praise for finding a way to work as a cohesive unit while shorthanded with the season teetering on a the cliff’s edge. Regardless of how things play out from here, these guys earned a spot in a storied history book.
For the rest of our lives, whenever any Red Sox team goes on a double digit winning streak, a graphic will pop up on the screen showing the longest Red Sox winning streaks of all time, and sitting there right next to an absolutely loaded 1946 team will be this group of “dawgs that just want to win” as Anthony Seigler put it. It will be another magnificent reminder that every once in a while, baseball produces the seemingly impossible.
This Red Sox team — and I emphasize THIS Red Sox team — tied the franchise record for most consecutive wins. This is the same group that couldn’t muster a winning streak longer than three games as of a month ago and was setting daily records of futility not seen since the Depression-era Red Sox of the 1930s. Somehow it was THIS group that pulled off the inconceivable.
Not the 2004, 2007, 2013, or even 2018 powerhouses. Not one of those 1970s teams that always got off to hot starts before letting glory slip through their fingers, and not one of those 1910s squads that won four World Series in seven years that we know only from black and white photographs. No, it was this 2026 group who basically ended up together by accident after huge pieces of the roster either didn’t perform or ended up on the IL.
Now what could be more absurd and wonderful than that?
