RED SOX
HEADQUARTERS

I want you to remember where we were, because the whole city has already conveniently forgotten. Thirty-seven and forty-eight. LAST PLACE in the American League East. I was on this microphone telling Craig Breslow — begging him, honestly — do not tear this down. Do not sell the arms. Do not hand this fanbase another August of watching kids get their feet wet in a lost year. And the honest truth is I did not have a single number on my side. I had a feeling and a lot of volume.

Then this club won FIFTEEN GAMES IN A ROW. Fifteen. Tying the longest winning streak in ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FIVE YEARS of Boston Red Sox baseball — a record that had stood untouched for eighty years, set by men in wool flannels. Nine-for-nine on a road trip before the break. A ten-game road winning streak folded inside it. Eighteen and four in July. You do not get numbers like that from a hot bat or a lucky week. You get them from a room that decided, collectively, that it was not going to be a seller.

Every broadcast partner who comes through here says the same thing when they walk out of the tunnel for the first time: "it is smaller than I thought." Yes. That is the point. Fenway Park opened in 1912 and it was shoehorned into a city block that already existed, which is why nothing about it is symmetrical and everything about it is unfair. Three hundred and ten feet down the left field line into a thirty-seven-foot wall. A right field corner that bends away from a hitter like it is running from him. A triangle in center that is four hundred and twenty feet from home plate and has swallowed more doubles than any groundskeeper can count.

The Green Monster is the most misunderstood object in American sport. Visitors think it is a home run wall. It is not. It is a DOUBLES factory. It turns lazy fly balls into ringing two-baggers and it turns rockets into loud singles, and the difference between a left fielder who has played eighty games in front of it and one who has played four is roughly two runs a night. Watch a visiting left fielder play a ball off it in the first inning of a series. He drifts back. He always drifts back. And then he watches a ball he could have caught on a bounce carom over his head to the shortstop.

Read the injury list from the first week of July out loud and try not to wince. Garrett Crochet. Kutter Crawford. Johan Oviedo. Tanner Houck. And then Connelly Early on top of it. Five arms, all down, and a big-league schedule that does not care. Most clubs lose that many starters and quietly become sellers by the twentieth. Boston took a fifteen-game winning streak into the All-Star break instead.

The math of how is straightforward and slightly insane: Sonny Gray was a genuine ace every fifth day, Ranger Suárez piled up strikeouts and kept the club in games he had no business keeping them in, rookie PAYTON TOLLE kept flashing legitimate front-end stuff before anybody had decided he was allowed to, and Jake Bennett battled. Behind them, a bullpen anchored by AROLDIS CHAPMAN — still throwing gas, still the reliever every contender in the league was calling about — and Tommy Kahnle eating the innings nobody wants.