The Red Sox did not make it to New York until 4:30 p.m. ET on Friday, and that late arrival pushed their game against the Mets back to 7:50 p.m. from 7:15 p.m. MLB announced the delay after the team spent much of the day stuck in Chicago because multiple issues grounded its chartered flight.
For Boston, the timing mattered because Friday night’s game at Citi Field was already on a tight turn after a three-game sweep of the Chicago White Sox on Thursday afternoon. Tim Britton reported that the Red Sox landed in New York at 4:30 p.m. ahead of the scheduled 7:15 p.m. start, and the club then reached Citi Field around 5 p.m., leaving only a short window before first pitch.
The delay also came after a brief period of uncertainty earlier in the afternoon. Around 3 p.m., a Mets spokesperson said the Red Sox had taken off and that the game was still expected to be played, even though Boston had not yet arrived in New York. Players typically get to the field roughly five hours before first pitch for workouts and treatment, so the late landing compressed a normal pregame routine into a rush.
This was not the first charter-flight problem for the Red Sox in recent weeks. On June 25, they were unable to leave Denver until the wee hours of the morning and did not get back to Boston until around 5 a.m. ET, before a game that night against the New York Yankees. Boston still won that game and then swept the Yankees in a four-game series, and the club has stayed hot since, winning 11 of its past 13 games and moving to within 2 1/2 games of the third wild-card spot in the American League.
So the night at Citi Field began with a travel problem rather than a baseball one, but the larger story is that Boston has kept winning through the interruptions. The only unanswered piece is the same one left by the grounded flight in Chicago: what exactly went wrong with the charter that kept the Red Sox in place until Friday afternoon.
