Over the past three weeks the Red Sox starting pitching has been firing on all cylinders, and most days throughout this historic win streak it\u2019s felt like the starter has had his best stuff.<\/p>\n
That was not the case for Sonny Gray on Sunday, but the Red Sox veteran battled through and got the job done anyway.<\/p>\n
Despite spotty command and tons of early traffic on the bases, Gray held the Tampa Bay Rays at bay and helped deliver the Red Sox their 13th straight win. Gray limited the Rays to a solo inside-the-park home run by Victor Mesa Jr. over six innings, and Willson Contreras connected for a two-run home run in the fifth inning to break things open in the eventual 6-1 Red Sox win.<\/p>\n
The Red Sox have now tied their second-longest win streak in franchise history, matching the 13 straight they won from July 18-27, 1948. The team is two wins away from matching the all-time club record of 15 straight set during the 1946 season.<\/p>\n
\u201cI won\u2019t shy away from what we\u2019re doing, this is pretty incredible,\u201d Red Sox interim manager Chad Tracy said. \u201cIt\u2019s a fun ride and we want to keep it going but focus on tomorrow and get ready to play again tomorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sunday was exactly the kind of game the Red Sox likely would have lost earlier in the season.<\/p>\n
Gray stranded a total of seven Rays baserunners, including two in each of the first three innings. He escaped the first inning unscathed after issuing a walk and a single in the first, but the Rays jumped ahead in the second when Mesa hit a perfectly placed line drive into the gap past Red Sox center fielder Ceddanne Rafaela for an inside-the-park home run.<\/p>\n
The ball bounced into the triangle and took Rafaela a beat too long to dig out, and even though the throw to the plate was likely in time, catcher Connor Wong couldn\u2019t receive the ball cleanly, allowing Mesa the first inside-the-parker at Fenway Park since Jarren Duran accomplished the feat on Aug. 23, 2025 against the Pittsburgh Pirates.<\/p>\n
Gray allowed another single and a walk after the homer but kept it a one-run deficit by recording three straight outs. That allowed the Red Sox to come back and tie the game in the bottom of the second on an RBI double by Andruw Monasterio, and despite continued traffic the Rays couldn\u2019t get anyone else home against Gray the rest of his outing.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe had to gut it out,\u201d Tracy said. \u201cHe did not have his best spin, there were times he didn\u2019t feel the spin was there as far as strike throwing, obviously not his best, but six innings, one run.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rays starter Shane McClanahan wasn\u2019t so fortunate.<\/p>\n
In the bottom of the third the Red Sox pulled off the rare feat of scoring three runs despite not recording a hit in the inning. Jahmai Jones led off with a walk, Wilyer Abreu was hit by a pitch and Contreras walked to load the bases with one out. The go-ahead run came in to score on a checked swing passed ball with Caleb Durbin at the plate, and Durbin extended the lead moments later with a chopper down the third base line that was hit just softly enough for Abreu to beat the throw home.<\/p>\n
Romy Gonzalez finished the rally with a run-scoring groundout, and in the top of the fifth Contreras wrapped up the scoring with a two-run bomb to the center field bleachers, his 22nd homer of the season.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s a big difference between early on and now is in those situations you get guys in scoring position it\u2019s maybe a strikeout or pop up, and that\u2019s what the Rays were doing to us earlier in the year,\u201d Durbin said. \u201cIt felt really good to be able to do it to them and take advantage of their mistakes the way they did to us early on.\u201d<\/p>\n
With a comfortable lead Gray finished his outing strong and drew a 4-6-3 double play to end the sixth. He finished with one run allowed over six innings on five hits, four walks and five strikeouts, giving him his ninth consecutive quality start dating back to May 30.<\/p>\n
Gray is the first Red Sox starter to record nine or more consecutive quality starts since Chris Sale back in 2018. Following the game Gray said he felt rusty but expects to get things dialed back in before his next start.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know what I did today is not sustainable, you\u2019re not going to go out and walk four and do that, and I know that, but at the same time you just play the hand you\u2019re dealt that particular day and that\u2019s just kind of what I did,\u201d Gray said. \u201cI need to be better, I will be better, I have a plan of how to be better going forward, so I feel good with it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Once again the bullpen took care of business and closed things out. Greg Weissert, Jovani Moran and Ryan Watson combined for three scoreless innings to wrap up the win.<\/p>\n
By completing a four-game sweep of the Rays the Red Sox are in a place where the AL East title no longer looks unattainable. Boston (50-48) is now only six games back of Tampa Bay (56-42) after at one point trailing by 15 1\/2 games in the division.<\/p>\n
That was on June 24, the night the Red Sox blew a late lead to cap off a series defeat to the last-place Colorado Rockies, and since then the Red Sox have won 18 of 20 games.<\/p>\n
Though this 13-game winning streak is Boston\u2019s longest in 78 years, several members of the Red Sox who played for Milwaukee last season \u2014 including Durbin, Monasterio and Anthony Seigler \u2014 enjoyed a similar stretch when the Brewers won 14 straight. But great as that was, Durbin said this Red Sox streak has felt much different.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt kind of flipped on a dime after that tough series in Colorado,\u201d Durbin said. \u201cWe let two games slip and then come back and have a great series against the Yankees, and had plane troubles, it felt like we were facing adversity off the field with that, and we\u2019ve just rolled with the punches so well and now it feels like we can\u2019t do any wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n
The reception this club has received at Fenway Park has completely flipped too. For months fans regularly booed the club and chanted things like \u201csell the team.\u201d But now the ballpark has turned into a nightly party, and over the past few days a new trend has emerged where instead of there being one \u201ctarps off\u201d section of guys taking off and waving around their shirts, the entire ballpark has gotten in on the action, creating a scene resembling a football crowd at kickoff.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s great, especially for the fans,\u201d Contreras said. \u201cI don\u2019t want them to start shouting sell the team, I don\u2019t like that, I take that personally, but they\u2019re passionate about it but I\u2019m really proud of my team, really proud of the work we\u2019ve done, really proud because of the way we started how we are right now, and I know there are a lot of games ahead, but they make me proud.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Red Sox will have a chance to further shore up their position in the AL East with the Baltimore Orioles and Toronto Blue Jays coming to town over the rest of this week\u2019s homestand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Over the past three weeks the Red Sox starting pitching has been firing on all cylinders, and most…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":345527,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[114484,77317,109496,141565,3817,23181,85680,113574,141564,135,3815,137,136,71145,113493],"class_list":["post-345526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tampa","tag-andruw-monasterio","tag-boston-red-sox","tag-caleb-durbin","tag-inside-the-park-home-run","tag-mlb","tag-rays","tag-red-sox","tag-romy-gonzalez","tag-sonny-gray","tag-tampa","tag-tampa-bay-rays","tag-tampa-headlines","tag-tampa-news","tag-victor-mesa-jr","tag-willson-contreras"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=345526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345526\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/345527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=345526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=345526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=345526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}