Red Sox 3, Dodgers 2

 

With last night's 3-2 win over the Dodgers, the mighty Boston Red Sox have now won their eighth straight series. No one can stop them, not the Rays or the Jays, not the A's or the O's. Not the Mets, not the White Sox, not the Angels. Not even the motherfucking Dodgers. Friendly reminder that all this started ten series ago, back in June, when they swept the Yankees. 

The last time the Sox won eight series in a row was 2013, and they went on to win the World Series that year. So bow down, MLB, to your new overlords, your next World Series champions, the Boston Red Sox! 

The Red Sox came into L.A. riding a hot streak, and the Dodgers tried to level the playing field by taking out Boston's best hitter, Willson Contreras, with a vicious fastball to the skull. He may return from concussion protocol today (if so, Daddy's back, you dirty Dodger motherfuckers), but the Red Sox still won two in a row without him. Cheaters never prosper.

Last night, Ceddanne Rafaela hit Yoshinobu Yamamoto's third pitch of the game out of the park, a 411-foot solo homer into deep left center. In case you thought that was a fluke, a bad pitch that just somehow got away from the Yams, Rafaela homered again in his next at bat, this time hitting the ball 421 feet into deep left center. The Yams gave up a third run in the eighth, a grounder by Connor Wong that turned into a double play but brought Andruw Monasterio home from third.

The Yams finished the game with three Boston strikeouts and two home runs. The Red Sox' Payton Tolle struck out seven and gave up only one homer. In a pitcher's duel between Tolle and the Yams, Tolle won and the Dodgers lost the game, 3-2.

The Dodgers were so freaked out by the losses (with back-to-back losses, they no longer have the best record in baseball) they went out after the game and purchased two-time Cy Young winner Tarik Screwball from the Tigers. The Dodgers are now so ridiculously overloaded that talk of parity in baseball and meaningful salary caps has already started. But they're still not so overloaded that they can beat the Boston Red Sox.

New York lost last night because the Yankees suck, so now Boston (59-51) is only 2½ back from them in the AL East and the Wild Card standings. 

Game three of the Dodgers series, and the last game of this West Coast Road trip, starts at 7:20 tonight. Big Jake Bennett (6-4, 2.74) starts tonight for his first appearance in Dodgers Stadium. L.A. will start Emmet Sheehan (4-7, 4.95). Sheehan has faced the Sox once before, five innings last year in Fenway, when he gave up two runs and struck out five. But Sheehan's record this year begs the question how a starting pitcher on a 69-42 team can have an overall losing record - his seven losses account for 17% of all the Dodgers losses this year.

History is being made this season. This is as good as it gets for sports fans. Get on board and enjoy the ride, folks!

Red Sox 9, Dodgers 4

 

In-fucking-credible! The 15-game win streak may have ended, but the season turnaround of all season turnarounds continues.  The mighty Boston Red Sox have gone 26-5 since June 25, the start of the homestand against the Yankees, and 21-4 in the month of July, the winningest month in 125 years of Red Sox baseball. Their .840 winning percentage in July passed the franchise record of .800 set in August 1950 and June 1901. 

Their 21-4 July record is the fifth best in MLB history for the month. The record, if you're curious, is the 20-3 run (.870) by the 2017 L.A. Dodgers, and last night, the Red Sox beat the Dodgers, 9-4, to end the month of July with one big fat exclamation point.  

This is a truly historic run - no hyperbole or fan-boy overstatement - and if you've still got your head up your ass and ignoring it, that's on you, boo. You're not likely to see a team this on fire again in your lifetime.    

What a game! The scoring started in the second inning when Jarren Duran, yes, Jarren Duran, hit an RBI single, scoring Caleb Durbin. For the haters out there, Duran also had another RBI in the seventh when be brought Durbin home again with a ground out.

But everyone knows you don't beat the Dodgers in L.A, with a single run, and the Dodgers helped us out by allowing two more runs in the third inning when meme player Freddie Freeman bobbled a Masataka Yoshida hit up the first-base line and allowed Ceddanne Rafaela and Nick Sogard to score.

But everyone also knows you don't even beat the Dodgers in L.A. with three early-inning runs, and Freeman reminded us of that in the fourth, when he (partially) atoned for his error by hitting a single that brought Shohei Ohtoni home from third. The Dodgers made it 3-2 in the fifth inning with another RBI single, and then Ohtoni gave L.A. a 4-3 lead with a two-run homer in the Dodgers' very next at-bat.

At that point, I was already consoling myself with "You can't win 'em all" and "At least we played them tough," but then Rafaela stepped to the plate in the seventh and crushed a two-run homer 411 feet into deep left center. But the Red Sox weren't done that inning, far from it, and Andruw Monasterio hit a double, scoring Yoshida and Wilyer Abreu to make it 7-4, Boston. And that set the stage for Duran's second RBI of the night, the groundout that scored Durbin a second time.

And here's the real shocker: Brayan Bello was near perfect in four innings of shutout relief, striking out three, including the last batter in the ninth inning, and giving up only three hits. Bello, who has the worst ERA (10.35) in baseball among starting pitchers, now has the best ERA among relievers (0.69). Overall, Boston pitchers now have the third-best team ERA (3.54), in all of baseball, even including Bello's numbers, better than the Dodgers' 3.61. 

Where was Willson Contreras in all this?, you ask. On the bench, in concussion protocol. He got beaned in the third inning - hit in the head by a speeding fastball thrown by L.A. starter Cole Irvin. Now, you could give Irvin the benefit of the doubt - Contreras is known for crowding the plate, and sometimes pitches go a foot or two off target, it happens. But the pitch was the second up-and-inside of the at-bat, and Contreras had to hit the dirt two pitches earlier, so it doesn't look completely accidental. The Dodgers pulled Irvin after the errant pitch, but I'm not impressed - Irvin's throw proves the Dodgers are a bunch of dirty, low-life, cheating motherfuckers (except for Mookie, of course), who think nothing of injuring an opposing player, even ending a career, if it burnishes their statistics even in the slightest. It's no coincidence that Dirty Don Drysdale, their legendary hero, still holds the NL record for hit batsmen (154). They can all rot in hell for all I care.  

The Red Sox are now 58-51, and with Tampa Bay losing last night, are now only six games out of first in the AL East, 3½ back from the second-place Yankees in both the division and Wild Card standings. Last night's win was the fourth of this seven-game road trip, guaranteeing they'll return to Fenway with a winning record for this West Coast trip. 

Tonight's game starts at 9:10, the last game that Boston will start after 9:00 pm this season. Payton Tolle (6-6, 3.32) gets the start for Boston, his first game in Dodgers Stadium and first time facing the team. The Dodgers will start Yoshinobu Yamamoto (11-6, 2.72), who despite three years in L.A., has not faced the Red Sox yet. So we'll have two teams getting their first looks at two pitchers.  

Exciting, isn't it?