BOSTON — The Tampa Bay Rays opened the second half of the season exactly where they left off in the standings — atop the American League at 56-40 — but ran headlong into the hottest team in baseball Friday, dropping both ends of a doubleheader to the surging Boston Red Sox, 10-0 and 5-3, at Fenway Park.
Boston has now won 11 straight and 16 of its last 18, trimming Tampa Bay’s lead over the Yankees to just 2 1/2 games and turning the AL East into a genuine dogfight entering the season’s final stretch. “We’re getting into crunch time. We’re starting off the second half with division rivals and two teams that had been, going into the break, playing very well,” veteran starter Nick Martinez said. “It’s going to be a dogfight, and as we get closer to September, it’s just going to get nasty.”
The Rays were lifeless at the plate in Game 1, managing only three hits and a walk against Red Sox left-hander Jake Bennett, who breezed through six innings on 65 pitches. Tampa Bay advanced just one runner to second base the entire game. “You’re going to have games where you come out aggressive, and you just catch a ball off the end, off the handle [or] you’re a little late, a little early. So I think that’s all it was,” shortstop Taylor Walls said.
Starter Griffin Jax generated 15 whiffs but was undone by soft contact and bad bounces, including a Masataka Yoshida homer hit at just 87 mph with an expected batting average of .010. “You put the ball in play, good things tend to happen sometimes,” Jax said. “I think that was ultimately what happened.” A six-run sixth inning, fueled by back-to-back bunt singles and a throwing error charged to catcher Nick Fortes, blew the game open. “They created their opportunities and capitalized when they had guys on base,” manager Kevin Cash said.
The Rays showed more fight in Game 2. Jonny DeLuca drove in two runs with the bases loaded in the first inning, and Junior Caminero, brushing aside concerns about a hand injury sustained at the All-Star Game, crushed his 29th home run in the third. But right-hander Mason Englert, called up as the 27th man to start the nightcap, could not deliver a shutdown inning either time. Wilyer Abreu and Willson Contreras hit back-to-back homers in the first, and Abreu added another tiebreaking blast in the third. “That was super frustrating,” Englert said. “As a competitor there, you’re definitely frustrated because you want to put up a shutdown [inning] and keep the team ahead there, so it sucks when that doesn’t go your way.”
Cash echoed the frustration. “When you get a lead like that, you want to set a tone and be able to get that clean inning and shutdown inning,” he said. “We weren’t able to get that.”
Caminero, the young infielder who has emerged as one of Tampa Bay’s cornerstone players, kept his message simple after more than eight and a half hours of baseball. “Tomorrow is another day. Tomorrow, come here like Opening Day and lock in, man,” Caminero said. “Today, put that baseball away, and tomorrow, lock in.”
The Rays have two more games this weekend at Fenway Park against the Red Sox before heading to Toronto for a four-game series.