Rays - 000 012 020 - 5 8 0
Red Sox - 200 000 000 - 2 8 1
Also: Yankees 6, Blue Jays 4 (10). Toronto leads by 2.5 games.
Matt Moore / Henry Owens
Betts, RF
Rutledge, 2B
Bogaerts, SS
Ortiz, DH
Shaw, 1B
Castillo, LF
Swihart, C
Marrero, 3B
Bradley, CF
Alex Speier,
108 Stitches (Globe):
This doesn't happen.
To have one player who is so good at such a young age is catching lightning in a bottle. To have another bolt strike the same place at the same time? Preposterous.
Yet that's what's happening right now with the Red Sox. Xander Bogaerts and Mookie Betts, born five days apart in the first week of October 1992, are both emerging in a way that has them leading the Red Sox out of the ignominy of last place with the possibility of vastly better days on the horizon. ...
[Bogaerts is] now hitting .323 with a .353 OBP and .426 slugging mark. In the last 75 years, here's the complete list of American League players to hit .320 or better in their age 22 seasons (or younger):
Ted Williams (Hall of Famer, 1940-41)
Al Kaline (Hall of Famer, 1955)
Paul Molitor (Hall of Famer, 1979)
Ken Griffey Jr. (soon-to-be Hall of Famer, 1991)
Alex Rodriguez (would-have-been Hall of Famer, 1996)
Mike Trout (likely-to-be Hall of Famer, 2012-13)
Bogaerts ...
How rare is it to have two players who are so young performing at that level on the same team? Since 1901, the Red Sox are now just the third team with two players who, in their age 22 season or younger, have posted a WAR of 4.0 or better. The others were the 1909 Tigers (Ty Cobb, Donie Bush) and the 1970 Reds (Johnny Bench, Bernie Carbo).
Betts and Bogaerts have each reached base 200-plus times this year (Betts has exactly 200). They're the first Sox teammates to reach 200 times at the age of 22 or younger since Tony Conigliaro and George Scott in 1966 — a performance that offered a harbinger of the Sox emerging from second-division failure as a regular contender.
2 comments:
Jon Shestakofsky @Shesta_Sox: "Xander Bogaerts has 26 RBI in 25 plate appearances with the bases loaded this season: 10-for-24 (.417), 4 doubles, triple, slam, sac fly."
ELIAS:
David Price threw seven scoreless innings against the Yankees on Monday to improve to 17-5 this season - he went 9-4 for Detroit and he's now 8-1 in 10 starts for Toronto. Over the last 123 seasons (since 1893), only three other pitchers won at least eight games and had winning records for each of two different teams in one season: Hank Borowy (1945 Cubs and Yankees), David Cone (1995 Blue Jays and Yankees) and Bartolo Colon (2002 Indians and Expos).
The Mets shut out the Braves on Monday, 4-0, with the first two runs coming against Shelby Miller. Miller is now winless in his last 23 starts, tying the second-longest single-season streak of that kind in major-league history. The longest streak was 27 in a row, by Jack Nabors, of the 1916 Philadelphia Athletics; he never started another game in the major leagues. Two other pitchers had 23-start streaks: Cliff Curtis of the Boston Braves in 1910 and Matt Keough of the 1979 A's.
Xander Bogaerts's eighth-inning grand slam turned a 6-4 deficit into an 8-6 lead in the Red Sox' win over the Rays on Monday. Over the last 20 years, the only other Red Sox player to hit a behind-to-ahead grand slam at Fenway in the eighth inning or later was Mo Vaughn, who hit a walkoff grand slam in Boston's home opener in 1998.
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