Navafan29

After watching the happy champagne celebration of many uncensored F-bombs, I am feeling more like this clinching night fits this Red Sox team. And here's why: The theme of the Red Sox this year is that they stay consistently good and emotionally strong despite events that should bring them down; all of the heartbreaking losses this year were not enough to make the Red Sox give up, because the Red Sox didn't let anything get to them. Coming off of the near-worst possible way to lose a game tonight, mourning the loss for just enough time to respect that they failed a small battle, but then walking directly towards a champagne celebration is a lot like what they've done all year. Not caring about the past despite how unbelievably stupid some of it was, and realizing that how one handles the present is all that matters, is what this team has done all year. Baseball really does teach life lessons, you know? I'm satisfied with tonight. I'd love to see us have a bunch of awkward games down the last stretch that should mess with our emotional stability, but see us not care and sweep the ALDS anyways.

This pretty much denied us of a super exciting AL East clinching moment. We're gonna have to wait for our first playoff series win for that epic celebration feel. Just glad we clinched though! I suspected Kelly would have a chance to be another Kimbrell in the 9th. Here's his chance to prove it.

The way the Toronto game is going, we might clinch the AL East while we're on a commercial break in this game! Pleasee don't let it be that anticlimactic.

I swear Betts intentionally hits choppers that go over the infield's head for clutch base hits. This is at least the third RBI on a chopper like that he's hit this year.

This is unbelievable. Worst thing to happen in baseball in the last 20 years probably. In my opinion, the Marlins should get draft pick compensation, if that's possible.

Red Sox are just taking all of their missing close game wins from all year and putting them into this winning streak. We may actually have an average record in close games this year if this keeps up. This was a huge win (duh). We gotta try to go into the final Toronto series up by 4 games or more so that we can coast into the ALDS and just say "see ya Toronto, you can beat us in this last series if you want, now have fun in that Wild Card game".

Rays have it rougher than any team in baseball when you think about it. They are in the hardest division, have to play moneyball, and have the worst ballpark. With the way the Red Sox, Blue Jays, and Orioles are further along than them in winning team development, it's gonna be extremely difficult for them to win the division any time soon. This means that the Rays' entire seasons will continue to depend on a one-game wild card playoff... The Rays are my least favorite MLB team but even I feel bad for them.

I'm not joking, right before the pitch of Pedroia's extremely clutch grand slam, I jokingly said that he'll hit a grand slam. Unbelievable.

Lol to stall with mound visits? I agree that the veteran salary inflation gets ridiculous. I'm not sure what we'd legally "have" to offer Buchholz before he becomes a free agent, but I don't think he should get 13 million next year. He did battle back hard from the big low point by caring more than we thought he did, so if he does good in the playoffs, I want him back. I think we should avoid the big salary by giving Buchholz a contract that basically keeps him for the rest of his career, but at a much lower cost. Maybe 7 years and $5 million per year?

Why do people try to make everything about race? Things like this usually aren't about race; they're about the financial status that one is born into. Most of the time when you have a situation where the percentage of blacks in X is unusually low, it's because the lower class population is made up of a higher percentage of blacks than the middle class population is. A black middle class baseball fan is just as likely to become an MLB player as a white middle class baseball fan. Nobody bothers to isolate financial and family situation to solve issues like the one we have here. People want to make it only about the color of one's skin, because racism is very simple to solve whereas financial issues are not. Is there a race related reason why more blacks are born into poor families than whites? Probably, but we couldn't go into that without going off topic. Right now we're talking about whether or not the color of one's skin alone can help determine one's MLB success. Another thought: Perhaps (not saying this is true with certainty, but just a thought) part of this issue is that society and stereotypes (e.g. stand-up comedians) pressure people into acting a certain way or getting into certain crowds based on their race. This causes black kids to become interested in NBA while they're young and ignore the thought of watching baseball. NBA fans tend to desire constant action and get bored of watching things like baseball. This makes them not want to play baseball as much as say basketball. I read a blog post from a black man once who said his favorite sport to watch is NHL, but his entire family never watched NHL (but loved NBA) because "there isn't anyone who looks like us in the NHL". Now this was just one guy's story and one blog post, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

So now we're the super clutch team that always wins close games? I'll take it! I think we somehow got past the "worrying about making the playoffs" phase and are now mostly worried about whether or not we win the division. Last time I checked our division odds (like a couple weeks ago) we only had a 40% chance to win the division due to the close 3-way race. As of right before today however, our odds of winning the division according to MLB.com had shot up to 81%. Should be a little higher now! Our odds of making the playoffs is at 99% (98.9 to be exact).

Move Hanley to 3rd in the lineup right now.

Wow, wasn't sure if Betts would catch that. Let's win the final game of the series we're not supposed to win.

That was freakin incredible. How in the world does Hanley take those 2 pitches middle-in but out of the zone, and then crush the 3 run bomb on the away pitch? And how about Holaday??

Wow, I'm speechless. Good thing I had the guts to watch the end. The bullpen rallied to hold the Yanks off just in case of a very unlikely comeback. Our team had been through so much tough losses that they weren't even nervous in the 9th and must have thought "what's the worst that could happen, another tough loss? I'm not afraid of that". Even after we got caught in the rundown between home and 3rd, we kept pressing. When Ramirez hit the cross-up 99 MPH fastball, I thought it was a popup to end the game for 0.3 seconds, but then I saw the crowd reaction and new it'd be off the wall at least. Can't imagine being there. Might go see if I can find footage in the ballpark from people who went. When the Red Sox's other comebacks this year were happening, they seemed to come at more of a surprise. But during this one, I had "the feeling" that they might actually do it. This was the hard fought win we needed to change our destiny for the better. I am now officially predicting that the Red Sox will win the division and at least make it to the ALCS. After reviewing my top 5 games this year, I think this one takes the #1 spot. The only game that could compete with this was the June 24th game in Arlington where we were also down by 3 going into the 9th. You could argue that the Texas game was a slightly more improbable comeback given that we were down 3 runs with 2 outs and only a runner on 1st before the comeback started. But that comeback was mostly against Matt Bush, whereas today's comeback was mostly against Delin Betances. Now it's also about the whole game, not just the comeback. Both games had the theme of the bullpen having to hold off the other team without knowing if their effort would be vain or not; but sometimes that's just what you gotta do. The @ Rangers game was from down 6-0, a greater deficit to overcome than today's game. And the @ Rangers game was without the expanded rosters, meaning that the bullpen putting a lot of effort in was higher stakes than this game. However, today's game had the Fenway roaring crowd, was a result of our skill more (the Texas game had some wild pitches in our favor IIRC), a little lower scoring and better played, had more playoff implications, was higher stakes standings-wise, denied a losing skid, was against the Yankees, and was a walk off. So hat's off to the best game of the year. Let's win this division.

Did Wakefield just say in the pregame about Billy Butler "You don't want any cancers on your club." ?? If I heard that right, then he sounds like a Talk Sox user. This year, I've given up thinking about the past. I don't care how frustrating and stupid some previous games have been. I just want to win right now.

Let's go! We gotta try to take every win we can get. Come back from 5-0!

The way we have been swinging the bat, I'm actually more worried about our ability to keep the O's from scoring more runs than us scoring enough to tie it up. Let's abuse the increased roster by using enough pitchers to hold them off.

Too bad about Bomberanz. But to have a season with enough wins to win a division, some of them have gotta be tougher comeback wins. 2/3 of the game to go... let's score 9 more runs.

I thought about it for a few minutes and I think I figured out why Ziegler was brought in today. Farrell is predicting that we'll win by a comfortable amount in the E-Rod start tomorrow, but that we'll have a rougher time winning in the Buchholz start. By putting Ziegler in now, it gets his rust off, yet gives him a day to rest before he's predicted to be needed in the Buchholz game.

Why is Ziegler warming up? This is the one time we don't need him. He better only face 1-2 batters (enough to get him some practice but not enough to tire him out). Might need him tomorrow.

Yankees helped us get on top of the division by beating the Blue Jays. Now we're returning the favor by pushing the WC teams down closer... Awkward temporarily alliance. Then we'll hate the Yankees again when we play them.

Called it that Ramirez would crush one this AB! What a great feeling to be winning the biggest game of the year! Let's do this! 2nd biggest game so far tommorrow.

In my opinion, Porcello is the manliest pitcher on the team. When he starts to struggle, he doesn't care and mans up enough to overcome it.

Great now it'll be 3 weeks before we see another steal attempt.