The Red Sox are back at.500 after a 5-3 win over the Tampa Bay Rays on Friday completed a doubleheader sweep and stretched their winning streak to a season-high 11 games. Wilyer Abreu drove the turnaround with two home runs, including the swing that put Boston ahead for good in the third inning.
That pushed the Red Sox to 48-48 for the first time since March 28, a mark that once looked far away when the season had already started to tilt the wrong way. Friday’s result also put Boston in rare company: the club has now reached an 11-game winning streak only four times in the past 30 seasons, with the most recent run coming from Sept. 15-25, 2016.
The Rays made Boston work for it early. Eduardo Rivera allowed a two-run single to Johnny DeLuca in the top of the first, then Abreu answered in the bottom half with a game-tying two-run homer. Willson Contreras, back from a five-game suspension, added a go-ahead solo shot in the first, but Junior Caminero tied it again with a solo homer in the second before Abreu went deep again in the third to give the Red Sox the lead they kept.
Anthony Seigler’s RBI double in the fourth brought the Rays within range, but Boston’s relief work shut the door. Greg Weissert, Jovani Moran, Tyron Guerrero, Garrett Whitlock, Justin Slaten and Aroldis Chapman combined for 6 2/3 shutout innings, and the Red Sox turned double plays in the fourth and seventh to erase the kind of openings that can flip a game quickly. Abreu finished with his sixth career multi-homer game, and his second blast was his 13th of the season.
The shape of the game fit the stretch the Red Sox are in now: they fell behind, answered immediately and then kept adding enough to take control. That is a sharper version of a team that had often struggled to respond after early deficits, and it is why 11 straight wins, a sweep and a return to.500 all landed on the same Friday. The next question is not whether Boston has momentum; it is how long this version can keep turning close games into wins.
