Red Sox
Alex Cora has gotten the most out of his team, but it’s important to contextualize where they’re at right now.
COMMENTARY
There is absolutely something to be said for winning the games you’re supposed to win. And after a week where the Red Sox beat Phillies and Yankees teams the standings said they shouldn’t, they did the needed follow-up work in Toronto and Cincinnati.
“Athleticism and youth have put us in this spot,” manager Alex Cora told reporters after winning two of three over the Reds. “They’re establishing themselves as big leaguers, most of them . . . They show up and play.”
“We went from a roster that had some question marks early on in the season and now it feels like it’s one of the best rosters, position player-wise, that we’ve had in a while. From 1-13, we’re not afraid to play them. We’re in a good spot right now.”
Indeed. At 42-36, six games over .500 for the first time all season. Back in a wild-card position, having slid past the Royals. Ten wins in 13 games, still even in that span with the Mets — who had a sticky Sunday night at Wrigley Field.
It’s an impressive run, and a noteworthy one as the Celtics conclude and the stage largely becomes theirs until the late summer. As we’ve said repeatedly in this space, there is something with these Red Sox and Cora has gotten close to the absolute most out of it.
It’s important to contexualize it a little bit, though.
They were 1.5 games out of a playoff position before this 10-3 spate and only reached the third wild card Sunday, a testament to just how hard it can be to gain ground. And on Sunday, they became the 18th of the 30 major-league teams to win at least 10 over a 13-game run this season.
More than half the league has done it, including:
— The Cubs and those Reds, battling at the bottom of the NL Central;
— The injury-plagued Astros, who were 12-24 when they got hot and still aren’t .500;
— The aforementioned Mets, who like Houston are still multiple games under .500 despite it;
— The Giants, who have the fewest victories against teams at or above .500 (8-21) and who sit bottom of the National League’s middling horde.
A year ago, only six teams didn’t win 10 out of 13 at some point. The last Red Sox teams that didn’t were John Farrell’s last-place finishers in 2014-15. (As in, the equally bad teams of 2020, 2022, and 2023 all did.)
Heck, even the worst Red Sox team you hopefully ever have to watch did it at this exact same point in the calendar. Bobby Valentine’s 2012 crew won 12 out of 16 in the latter half of June, battling back from what had been a horrific spate of injuries not unlike what we’ve seen these past couple months.
“We’re not content,” Cody Ross told reporters that June 27, at the end of a 7-2 homestand and before a West Coast trip to AL dregs Seattle and Oakland. “If we keep playing like this, we’ll find ourselves in a pretty good spot.”
They lost five out of seven, then three of four to the Yankees, to begin an AL-worst 29-58 finish. They would’ve loved to be just mediocre.
Man. That got way darker than I wanted. Curse you, context! Next you’ll be telling me four wins in a row doesn’t mean a long-sought MLS Cup for our Revolution.
Because this is a fun Red Sox team, and not in the gallows humor way that 2012 was. Unlike the 13-for-13 series against the Jays, only 11 of Boston’s hitters had at least one hit against the Reds. Rafael Devers was 2 for 13. Ceddanne Rafaela was 1 for 11.
Jarren Duran made up for it. Red Sox fans are notoriously unmoved to vote their players into the All-Star Game, dating to the glory days of the early 2000s, but the weekend at Great American Ball Park made the center fielder’s case in full.
He went 7 for 13 with a 401-foot home run — after his 433-foot monster in Canada. He only stole one base, and he didn’t actually beat out a mildly mishandled bounder to first to begin Sunday, but that home-run robbery on Saturday afternoon was a bonafide game saver.
A game saveable because Duran scored on a 229-foot fly ball in the eighth. How impressive is that? Let’s give context another try.
This season, there have only been five shorter sacrifice flies, and four of them involved some sort of extenuating circumstance. A first baseman making a play in foul ground, racing away from the plate. A diving outfielder. In the case of Enmanuel Valdez scoring at Fenway on June 1, Detroit’s Riley Greene crashing into the short left-field wall.
Duran just beat the throw. It’s genuinely something few other major leaguers can do, and if you’ve been watching him this season, I dare say you weren’t even surprised watching him do it.
“That’s Jarren,” Devers told reporters Saturday. “Of course he was going.”
“You’ve got to take chances,” said Cora, who’d just used six relievers to win a game a day before he’d use eight. “I don’t see us struggling for long stretches because we can steal a game.”
“Every day it’s an honor for me to be able to be in the lineup and play with these teammates and with this coaching staff behind me,” said Duran, whose struggles on field and off to reach this point should never be forgotten. “I wouldn’t trade this for the world.”
Duran, if you’re inclined to care, is fourth in the AL for fWAR among outfielders, behind Aaron Judge, Juan Soto, and Cleveland’s Steven Kwan. WAR is a counting stat, so it should be noted Houston’s Kyle Tucker is just behind Duran despite playing 18 fewer games.
But also, Duran’s played 18 more games because he’s started — not merely played — every day.
Kudos to NESN for pointing out the last two Red Sox to get deeper into a season without missing a start were Mo Vaughn (99 in 1996), who was remarkably durable in his late-90s heyday, and Adrian Gonzalez (85 in 2011), who played at least 156 games in 11 (!) straight seasons from 2006-16.
Now comes the inexplicably hard part: Carrying on at home. The Sox woke up Monday morning baseball’s only better-than-.500 team that’s under .500 (18-20) at home. The possible cures comes in the form of the Blue Jays, swept in Cleveland after the Red Sox finished with them, and the Xander Bogaerts-less Padres, getting a massive boost from next-big-hope Jackson Merrill.
The work of the mediocre team is never done. Suffice to say, their emerging star and the energy-laden team at large know that.
“It’s fun to watch,” Cora regularly tells reporters, and did again Sunday.
And it’s not just blind optimism to think it could easily continue to be.
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