The Red Sox finished the job on Sunday, beating the Dodgers 8-4 to complete a three-game sweep in Los Angeles. Jake Bennett handled the final push, working 5 2/3 innings and earning the win after Boston answered a second-inning wobble with a third-inning burst that changed the game for good.
That matters because this was not just one sharp night on the west coast. Over the weekend, Boston won its 15th straight game and stretched its run to eight consecutive series victories, then closed a 6-1 west coast road trip by taking all three from a Dodgers club that had briefly seized control. The Red Sox scored first for the third game in a row, with Masataka Yoshida and Caleb Durbin driving in runs on back-to-back RBI singles in the top of the first, and the early cushion looked important when the Dodgers scored three in the bottom of the second to go ahead 3-2.
Boston answered immediately. Ceddanne Rafaela led off the third with a solo shot, Wilyer Abreu followed on the next pitch, and Yoshida added the third home run of the inning off Emmet Sheehan. Four Red Sox players went deep overall, with Jarren Duran adding the fourth in the sixth, and that kind of damage left the Dodgers chasing a game that had slipped away in a matter of minutes. Sheehan was charged with five runs over 2 2/3 innings, allowing six hits and a walk while striking out four.
Bennett’s line was quieter, and that is what made it notable. He gave up three runs on six hits, intentionally walked one batter and struck out four, then settled in after the second-inning jam and finished the kind of outing rookies are not often trusted to deliver in a game with this much weight. The Dodgers added an RBI double from Andy Pages with two outs in the seventh, but by then Boston had already done enough to turn a tight game into another result that fit the larger run.
Rafaela homered in all three games of the series and four times total, which gave the sweep its most consistent individual thread. The Dodgers are the two-time defending World Series champions, and they had gone into the weekend with the kind of profile that usually punishes mistakes. Instead, the Red Sox left Los Angeles with another series victory in hand and the sense that their streak is no longer a hot spell so much as a hard-earned standard. They will return home trying to keep both the winning streak and the series run alive.
