Red Sox Beat Yankees In Wild Card Game, Advance To ALDS, We All Do A Happy Dance

There are some nights when I kinda dread this. Maybe the Red Sox lost in some nightmarish defensive way, like someone tried to eat the ball or something, or it was announced that a third of the starting lineup has COVID. Those are nights it can be tough to find the words. Tonight is not like that. Tonight it’s hard to edit myself. There’s so much to discuss! Nate Eovaldi was virtually unhittable, Xander Bogaerts was his clutchiest and All Stariest self, the bullpen, Jerry Remy, the crowd… It’s hard to keep it all in my head. These are the good nights, even the best nights. I hope you enjoyed watching the game half as much as I'm enjoying reliving it over and over again.

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Last night, the Red Sox put the cherry on their sundae of a 2021 season by beating their arch-rivals, the New York Yankees, in the AL Wild Card game at Fenway Park, 6-2. With that win, it’s very hard to see the season as anything but a smashing success. Like, you have to really want it. The Red Sox not only made the playoffs, they won a round, and they put the Yankees on their butts and sent them home for the season. How do you not love that? I know the World Series is always the goal, but if everything stopped here, right now, my guess is in a decade you and I would look back at the 2021 Red Sox season and smile. You done good, Red Sox. You done good.

Real Fans

As great as the Red Sox were on the field though, the image that stands out most in my mind isn’t Eovaldi, or Bogaerts, or Devers’ goofy grin, but the Fenway crowd. It’s been a while since we’ve been treated to that kind of energy, that kind of collective power at Fenway. Last season was the season of cardboard fans and necessary as that was the games lost something without people there to see them. But I didn’t really realize how much they’d lost until last night. The Fenway crowd was on its feet immediately! A roar reached out through my TV screen and engulfed me for nine full innings. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be there in the stands, let alone to be Nate Eovaldi standing on the Fenway mound, feeling that support.

Eovaldi

Speaking of Eovaldi, wow was he fantastic. His line of 5.1 innings, four hits, eight Ks, no walks, and one run doesn’t do his dominance justice. It’s like when you go to a beautiful beach or to the top of a mountain and the view takes your breath away, so you take a picture and later you look at that picture and it just looks like a beach or a bunch of faraway land. It’s not exactly ‘you had to be there’ but to make the Yankees look punchless the way Eovaldi did over five innings was a thing of beauty, way better than just the stat-line.

It was a start perpendicular to his most recent start against the Yankees, in that all his pitches were working as opposed to none of them. He was commanding his fastball, and his curveball was as good as I’ve ever seen it. He even made Rougned Odor look silly with a splitter and even though Odor doesn’t need anyone’s help looking silly, I appreciated it anyway.

It wasn’t all good though. Giancarlo Stanton is (now was!) on one of his crazy tears and managed two shots off the Green Monster during the game, both likely home runs in other ballparks. In the first inning Stanton hit one off of Eovaldi that he, ESPN’s play-by-play man Matt Vasgersian and the entire Yankees announcing team were certain was gone.

Timothy Burke @bubbaprog

this is the product the most valuable sports franchise in America chooses to put on the air

Except, as we know, it wasn’t gone. It was still here. Stanton didn’t hustle out of the box so he wound up with only a single (always run out your fly balls, kids!) and the announcers were left looking a bit silly.

To my eye Eovaldi struggled a bit with his fastball command in the first inning. The first pitch of the game was a ground out by Anthony Rizzo, but it was a 114 mph ground out that Bobby Dalbec was fortunately standing in front of. Stanton’s ball wasn’t as crushed as it looks like according to StatCast, but looking at where that ball hit up on the wall, I do think it would’ve been out at Yankee Stadium. Eovaldi got through it though with a bit of help from Stanton showing off and the fans, and after that he really settled down.

It’s also worth noting that Eovaldi threw 71 pitches. The first pitch of the ALDS will be delivered on Thursday, which is too soon for Eovaldi to start, but perhaps he could be in line to start Game Three, back here at Fenway Park on Sunday. I don’t see a way he starts twice in the series, but if it goes five games, maybe he’d have an inning or two of bullpen work in him. We’ve seen before that sometimes he can be pretty good out of the pen.

X

I don’t want to belabor this so I won’t: Xander Bogaerts was electric. His two-run homer in the first inning of off a Cole meatball (it was really a changeup) set the tone for the evening, forced the Yankees to play from behind, and was, as it turned out, most of the knockout punch that eventually sent Cole to the showers two innings later. Bogaerts also had two walks and scored a second run on Alex Verdugo’s double.

But even without all that though, X made his mark on the game. After Stanton’s second gunshot off the top of the Monster in the sixth, Aaron Judge came chugging around third trying to score what would have been the Yankees second run. The bounce off the wall eluded Verdugo but was picked up by Enrique Hernandez who was backing up on the play and thrown in. Bogaerts was the cutoff man on the play standing behind second base. He picked up the short hop and threw to catcher Kevin Plawecki on the fly to get Judge by several feet. The play went from a two run homer and a tied game to a double that cut the Red Sox lead to one, to no runs in (somehow), two outs and a runner on second. That runner was then stranded when Ryan Braiser got Joey Gallo to pop up. That’s quite a turnaround!

Xander gets a lot of crap and some of it is deserved, but he’s still a fantastic baseball player and I’ll take him on my team (at some to-be-determined) defensive position any day.

Buh-bye: Yankees

The 2021 Yankees season ended yesterday and they have some real questions to answer. Where as the Red Sox are ascending, to me it feels like the Yankees are on the descent. They are the Yankees though, so they’re never out of it. They could always throw $300 million at Carlos Correa and another $200 million at Robbie Ray, but even if they do, I’m not sure that addresses the many holes in the roster they’ve developed.

The Yankees will remain an interesting figure and a team worth beating going forward, so I don’t mean to insinuate they are done or anything. They’re not. But they do have a lot of work to do this off-season if they want to win the division in 2022.

Up Next: The Rays

Obviously a lot more will be written here and (mostly) elsewhere about this upcoming matchup, but this is the next stop for your Boston Red Sox. They’ll face the Rays in the American League Division Series, a best-of-five format that starts this Thursday in Tampa.

The Rays are as difficult a matchup as exists in the American League this season. They won 100 games, they’re deeper than any team has a right to be, let alone one that spends roughly the amount on player salaries as your average monthly candle bill.

wint @dril

Food $200 Data $150 Rent $800 Candles $3,600 Utility $150 someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my family is dying

They also somehow finished second in baseball in runs scored. Wander Franco is eight years old (or about that) and already a force. This will be an extremely difficult test for the Red Sox. And yet…

Matthew Kory @mattymatty2000

Red Sox went 8-11 against the Rays this season, but the runs scored/allowed was 104-106.

If the Red Sox show up to hit and don’t make too many crucial brain-melting mistakes in the field, they have a real shot. They’re not going to be the favorites, but this might be a closer matchup than you’ll hear the experts babble about over the next few days.

One of those so-called experts will be babbling right here about the series over the coming days leading up to the first pitch. So please, if you haven’t already, subscribe to Sox Outsider. It’s going to be a fun ride. Thanks again for reading.