Red Sox split with Mets
After hours of storms forced the Red Sox and Mets to suspend Friday night’s series opener with New York leading 4-3 in the bottom of the fourth, the frenemy teams picked up exactly where they left off on Saturday afternoon.
Fenway Park had a chance to dry out, but the home team still looked waterlogged when the game resumed. The Mets never relinquished their lead from the night before, and won 5-4.
The innings played before the rain had been chaotic, and the mess continued on Saturday afternoon. The Boston bats came out strong in the first two frames, plating three runs on three hits, but the New Yorkers answered back immediately, with a leadoff doubles and 2-run homer in both the third and fourth.
With Friday’s starting pitchers Kutter Crawford and Kodai Senga unavailable for the resumption, both teams turned to their bullpens.
Alex Verdugo got back in the batter’s box; Senga had a 1-2 count against him when the game went into a delay on Friday night. Grant Hartwig took over for the Mets starter and needed just one pitch to complete Verdugo’s at-bat with a ground-out. Triston Casas followed with a 2-out single, but found himself picked off first base moments later.
Eighteen hours after it began, the fourth inning was finally over.
While the Red Sox kept going down 1-2-3 or stranding the few runners they did get, the Mets threatened almost every inning. New York led off six of nine frames frame with a base hit, including three leadoff doubles.
Joe Jacques replaced Kutter Crawford, who’d started the night before and allowed four earned runs on four hits. The 28-year-old rookie reliever put two runners on with a pair of singles before getting back-to-back strikeouts to end the fifth.
In the sixth, the usuallylights-out Brennan Bernardino put the game further out of reach. He gave up a leadoff double to Pete Alonso, who promptly advanced to third on a wild pitch and scored on Brett Baty’s single, extending the Mets lead to 5-3.
Richard Bleier’s 1-2-3 seventh finally snapped the Mets’ leadoff hit streak. He remained in for the eighth, when his teammates helped the Mets loaded the bases without making an out, and helped the veteran lefty out of the jam.
“JT is playing second today because we want the offense… I just wanted the best offense out there today,” Sox manager Alex Cora said of Justin Turner on Friday afternoon.
Unfortunately, the Sox skipper didn’t get what he was hoping for from Turner on Saturday afternoon. He finished the contest 0-for-4, snapping his hitting streak at 15 games. It was the longest active hitting streak in the majors, and the secondlongest by a Red Sox player aged 38 or older. (Ted Williams had a 17-game hitting streak in 1957.)
If only the Red Sox lineup could’ve done something with the many chances they got. Jarren Duran, Casas, and Rafael Devers each had a 2-hit game, and therefore, accounted for three-quarters of their team’s hits.
Game 2
Entering this season, the Red Sox hoped that a roster of proven veterans and rookies (or those barely out of rookie eligibility) would coalesce into the perfect winning equation, the ideal blend of experience, passion, and hunger to prove themselves.
That vision has manifested at several points throughout the season, but rarely so clearly as on Saturday night, when 34-year-old James Paxton (6 IP, 3 H, 3 R, 2 ER, 1 BB, 7 SO) and rookie Triston Casas (4-for-6, 2 R, 2 HR, 3 RBI, BB) propelled the Red Sox to a much-needed 8-6 victory over the Mets.
After failing to plate runs when they had the chance in the series opener against the super-team with the subpar record, the Boston bats exploded in the second game, tallying a season-high five home runs at Fenway.
Starting with leadoff home runs by Jarren Duran and Casas in each of the first two innings, once the Red Sox got going, they never really stopped. That they did so against Max Scherzer, who came into Saturday night’s contest with a 2.87 ERA over six career starts at Fenway (including five quality starts), only made the hit parade more impressive.
Over six innings, Paxton held the Mets to three hits, two earned runs, one unearned run, a walk, and struck out seven. Aside from a shaky fourth inning, the veteran left-hander brought his A-game.
For the second time in 24 hours, the Red Sox took an immediate lead and then watched it evaporate in the top of the fourth. After beginning the series 0-for-6, Francisco Lindor got the Mets’ first hit of the game, a 1-out single. Pete Alonso followed with a double.
What followed was a disaster of Little League-esque proportions. Jeff McNeil singled to center, then advanced to second when Duran’s throw home went over the cutoff man. As Lindor and Alonso scored, Jorge Alfaro fired the ball way off target. It rolled deep into center field, allowing McNeil to score the go-ahead run.
Paxton was charged with two of the three runs, Alfaro two errors.
But unlike the series opener, the Red Sox answered back forcefully. Yu Chang led off the bottom of the fifth with a Green Monster home run to re-tie the game.
In the bottom of the sixth, Casas made history. His second homer of the contest put the Red Sox up 5-3 and made him the first rookie to ever have a multi-homer game against Scherzer.
“He’s in a great place,” Alex Cora said postgame. “I know a lot of people were kind of like, down on him early on, but you dominate the strike zone, this is what’s going to happen. This is big leagues, you don’t come here and you dominate. There’s a few in the last few years, right? (Wander) Franco a few years ago, that’s about it.
“All those kids that are doing amazing things in this game, they struggled, or they went through the process, and now, they’re doing what they’re doing.”
“He’s a good hitter,” the manager continued. “He gets it more than some of the younger guys, and I’m glad that we stayed patient with him, understanding the process, and now we’re seeing that,” he said, gesturing towards the field.
“He has such good feel about his at-bats. Tonight, that was fun to watch, but this has been going on for a while,” Cora said. “Where he was in April, just keep growing and growing, very similar kind of like Dustin (Pedroia), right? In ‘07. Just a process and you keep going, and going, and going, and see where it takes us.”
Scherzer’s night ended in that historic fashion. For just the fourth time in his 16year career, he’d allowed four home runs in a single regular-season game.
For the second time this month, the Red Sox had homered at least five times in a game. It’s happened 102 times in franchise history; fittingly, the first time was also the second game of a doubleheader, on June 16, 1940.