Wild Card Bound! Red Sox Beat Nats, Advance To AL Wild Card Game Against... Well, You Know Who
The end of the regular season brings playoff hope to the Boston Red Sox
A strange, wonderful, infuriating, exhilarating, fantastic, horrid, annoying, and surprising regular season is over. In its wake we find the unexpected promise of one more game. If the season it sprung from is any indication, this game will, well, it will walk right up to us and kill us. Enjoy today, celebrate, because tomorrow the Red Sox play a baseball game.
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The Red Sox demise was, as it turns out, highly exaggerated. Against all odds, or at least against what’s left of the Washington Nationals, the Red Sox pulled out a 7-5 win on Sunday afternoon in Washington DC to improbably, impossibly, and incandescently reanimate their Wild Card dreams. With the win and a Yankees win over the Rays - New York beat Tampa, 1-0 on a… oh who cares how - the American League Wild Card game is set. The Red Sox will host the New York Yankees on Tuesday at Fenway Park. Buckle your damn safety belts!
Despite all the ups and downs of the season, the highs of July, the lows of August, the highs and lows of every single day since August, this season can now be seen as nothing short of a triumph. The Red Sox defied all the experts, all the spreadsheets, all the analysts (yours truly and the Red Sox own front office most certainly included) to rise from the ashes of a 2020 season spent entirely on giving up runs and slamming cast iron pans into their fans nether regions.
The most optimistic projections for the 2021 Red Sox ended up being about six wins short. Why? Numerous reasons, but a few stand out. Rafael Devers and JD Martinez bounced back from disappointing campaigns to post big seasons at the plate. The starting pitching got healthy (Chris Sale and Eduardo Rodriguez both started the season on the IL) and miraculously stayed there. A few new faces in Enrique Hernandez and Hunter Renfroe showed everyone how valuable they could be in regular roles. The bullpen, despite dissolving towards the end of the season, was good enough for months at a time to make up for other parts of the roster. Alex Cora, the occasional odd decision aside (batting Taylor Motter leadoff? Really?!?), managed the hell out of a roster decimated by COVID and injury. And Chaim Bloom ignored the slings and arrows to make some of the biggest deadline acquisitions in baseball.
And all of that could’ve so easily come to nothing had Rafael Devers not had the day of days. His homer in the fourth gave the Red Sox life. His single in the seventh gave the Red Sox hope. His homer in the ninth gave the Red Sox a win. I mean, just look at this laser beam.
Well, that and Nick Pivetta striking out Juan Soto, the best hitter in the damn National League, on perhaps the most beautiful curveball man has yet seen.
It wasn’t just Pivetta’s sick curve or Devers homer hit so hard he fooled the Red Sox announcers (listen to how long it takes Dave O’Brien to figure out the ball was going out and then look at how far gone the thing ended up going), it was Alex Verdugo rocking the baby in the form of a two run double in the seventh to tie a game the Red Sox had little business tying. It was Hirokazu Sawamura cleaning up Chris Sale’s bases loaded one out mess in the third with two pitches when the game threatened to get out of hand. It was Garrett Whitlock coming off the IL to throw a crucial scoreless seventh inning. It was Martin Perez of all people throwing a scoreless inning of his own, and Eduardo Rodriguez pitching a masterful and scoreless eighth inning despite throwing five innings two days earlier.
Those events and the connective tissue between them were enough to overcome yet another slow start to the game by the bats and another rough outing from ace Sale. If the Wild Card were any more than a single game it might be something to worry about, but we’ll move that particular problem to the “if necessary” pile and leave it alone until further notice.
For now, the Red Sox made the playoffs in a season when most thought it impossible. Yet, I feel it important to point out, I’m not deluded about this team. There is work to be done. It doesn’t take a baseball expert to see how the team doesn’t play defense, or how fly paper thin the bullpen is, or how the roster pieces don’t fit together.
Despite all their deficiencies, the sum of the qualities of the individual players and coaches combined to win 92 games. They made the playoffs anyway and have earned the right to compete against the best teams in baseball. Count them out if you want. Most will. That’s fine. The Wild Card game is on Tuesday and the Red Sox will take the field before the first pitch, so when you look at it like that, they’ve already won.
There will be more from me here later. For now, the Red Sox season rolls on, and with a tremendous opportunity on their doorstep as well, one we’ll certainly be discussing more tomorrow. For now, though, congratulations to the 2021 Boston Red Sox on making the playoffs! Get ready for the heart palpitations, extreme body sweat, and vein-shredding intensity of the playoffs. Like the Red Sox, we’ve earned it.