On paper, this cross-country road trip is where even the most optimistic Red Sox fans were supposed to reach a capitulation point. Despite a mostly successful 5-2 homestand to close out June against the Yankees and Nationals, reality and time were growling at the door in the form of an abysmal record and the aggressively approaching trade deadline.
The team was still 11 games under .500, and they were flying to California with no games at Fenway Park appearing on the schedule until July 17th. Suspensions
for Willson Contreras and Nate Eaton were handed down and had to be served within days, and to make matters worse, Connelly Early just hit the IL, joining Roman Anthony, Garrett Crochet, Trevor Story, Marcelo Mayer, Isiah Kiner-Falefa, Johan Oviedo, Nick Sogard, Tristan Casas, and Kutter Crawford without a timeline. The final death blow of this woefully disappointing season felt imminent and inevitable — Probably in the form of some walk-off in LA while the clock appropriately struck midnight on the east coast. Barring a miracle, this thing was over, and colossal consequences were coming.
And yet, in quintessential baseball fashion, this is the exact moment the seas parted, and the ship turned. Because baseball, despite being its own galaxy of numbers that revolves around strict rules, trends, data, and deep statistical blueprints, will every once in a while take all that logic and math, and light it on fire.
There’s no way this lineup, down on power to start the year, down Roman Anthony and Trevor Story for half the season, and down Willson Contreras for half this road trip should’ve had enough ammunition to make it through any game, let alone nine straight wins and the best Red Sox road trip since 1977. But it did.
There’s no way this rotation, down 80 percent of the guys who made the first five starts of the season (Garrett Crochet, Ranger Suarez, Connelly Early and Brayan Bello) for a solid chunk of the trip, should have pieced together a collection of gems that would make a pirate blush. But it did.
There’s no way Caleb Durbin, Andruw Monasterio, and Anthony Seigler — all three guys the Sox got back in the Kyle Harrison trade with Milwaukee — should have started making major, meaningful contributions on a nightly basis right when the team was at its most vulnerable, but they did.
There’s no way a room service, game ending double play ball should be the catalyst for the most improbable rally of the season, but it was.
And there’s no way plane problems should be a harbinger for a baseball team catching fire. And yet, here we are.
None of this makes sense, and that’s exactly why it’s so magical. We watch the 99 percent of the time to get the high off the one percent where everything goes haywire. In simplest terms, THIS IS THE GOOD STUFF!
As a proud nerd who spends hours looking at spreadsheets, tables, and trends, it’s the moments where sanity melts under a mushroom cloud of chaos that make life interesting, and in turn, baseball worth watching for weeks on end.
People complain life is monotonous and baseball is boring, and much of the time, they’re right ….. Until they’re absolutely not! Every once in a while, the daily box of possibilities bursts at its barriers and deals you an extreme, unexpected fate (good or bad) — And the next thing you know, you’re in a car accident, you receive a profoundly positive update after a cancer diagnosis, you’re meeting your soulmate for the first time, a tornado siren is blaring through your neighborhood, or the most disappointing baseball team you’ve ever watched is going on a road trip with a WooSox looking lineup and rescues the baseball summer that felt stolen three weeks ago.
It doesn’t have to make sense. It’s better that way.
If the Red Sox continue their heater into the second half and make a deep playoff run in the fall, the active roster will most certainly look a lot different than the group that just pulled the wagon from the cliff’s edge while traveling the Oregon Trail in reverse. (It has to if this front office is remotely serious about trying to take advantage of this historically weak American League.)
But while this group who just played their hearts out may not get October playing time, they could end up being the reason those opportunities exist at all, making their efforts an integral chapter in a much longer, more complex story.
Deep within the DNA of any successful baseball season are things like Tsung-Che Cheng’s three straight multi-hit games while playing solid defense at short, Patrick Sandoval returning to a Major League mound for the first time in two years while holding an explosive White Sox lineup to a single run, and Eduardo Rivera and Brayan Bello being great straight out of Worcester to help keep a long winning streak alive. They just don’t usually come piled on top of each other in such short order.
But for a week and a half, these delightful surprises fell like snowflakes in a ferocious February blizzard. Only here, they came in the blistering heat of summer, and turned a Red Sox road trip that was supposed to be a funeral, into a miraculous resurrection.
