Is there a more fun baseball archetype than the rookie pitching phenom? Mark Fydrich, Fernando Valenzuela, Kerry Wood, Dontrelle Willis, Jose Fernandez — these guys can take over entire summers.
Payton Tolle has everything it takes to put together a special rookie season, one that lives in the imagination of Red Sox fans for decades. He is charismatic, he is fun, he has a look, and as he showed us tonight, he can dominate arguably the best lineup in baseball for eight innings.
Tolle wasn’t getting
the whiffs he usually does. But he stayed in the zone and kept Braves hitters off balance all night. He should never again cross the city line into Worcester unless it’s to have a beer named after him at Wormtown.
Of course, for as good as Tolle was, it almost didn’t matter. The 2026 Boston Red Sox treat home plate like it’s a DMZ. They squandered leadoff doubles in the first and seventh. They managed only one run from a bases loaded, no-out situation in the fourth. They have only two hitters opposing pitchers would bother to scout. Luckily tonight, though, those two guys carried the lineup. Wilyer Abreu and Willson Contreras combined for four of the team’s seven hits, and paired up on Contreras’s game winning homer in the eighth.
Not wanting to viewed as one-dimensional, Contreras also came through with some clutch late-inning defense, including a smart hustle play that kept a runner at first after a nearly disastrous throwing error by Andruw Monasterio. Yes: on the day that Trevor Story was placed on the IL, the Red Sox almost lost the game due to an error by his replacement. O. Henry and Alanis Morissette would had to arm-wrestle to decide who would get to write about that one.
But the Red Sox did not lose the game. Tolle, Abreu, and Contreras won it for them. Now it’s someone else’s turn.
Three Studs
Payton Tolle, Willson Contreras, and Wilyer Abreu: We literally just went over this.
Three Duds
Aroldis Chapman: It was a save in the box score, but Aroldis Chapman completely lost the strike zone and nearly came unraveled with two down in the ninth, after the aforementioned Monasterio throwing error. This was the Chapman I was afraid we were going to get last year.
Andruw Monasterio: Committing the error itself earns you a dudship, especially if you also go 0-4 .
Caleb Durbin: There’s 0-3, and then there’s 0-3 with three groundouts. Sad.
