McAdam: Red Sox summon October magic for first win of new season

SEATTLE -- By the calendar, the Red Sox almost couldn't be further removed from last fall. Five months and a day have passed since they wrapped up the World Series at Dodger Stadium, still a sweet memory to be sure, but increasingly distant.

After all, this was a new season and it's still just March. It's hard to summon that feeling of urgency for the second game of a 162-game slog.

And yet, Opening Day had undeniably left them with a bad taste. Their ace, Chris Sale, had turned in a rare stinker and the Sox had produced little in the way of offense. They were uncharacteristically flat.

Worse, Friday looked like more of the same for a while. Once more, the Seattle Mariners were teeing off on a Sox starter, Nathan Eovaldi, and by the time the fifth inning rolled around, the Sox were just hoping to get through the night without completely burning their bullpen again. Nine more games await before a day off.

Then, the Sox kept chipping away — a single run in the fifth, another in the sixth. They added one more in the eighth, and could have had more but for a bizarre double-play which cut down another potential run at the plate and summarily killed a chance at a bigger rally.

At the very least, though, some life returned to the Red Sox. Something was stirring. And when Mitch Moreland, reprising his pinch-hitting heroics from the Series, cranked a 2-and-0 pitch from reliever Hunter Strickland out to right field, turning a two-run deficit into a one-run lead, the season had officially come to life.

Suddenly, T-Mobile Park, with a predictably smaller crowd than the one which had filled the ballpark for Thursday's opener, felt like Fenway West. The vast majority of fans on the third base side in the lower bowl were Red Sox fans and they made their presence known, infusing the visitor's dugout with an energy that had been noticeably absent all of Thursday and most of Friday, too.

Everything new was old again. March was the new October. And when the closer du jour, Matt Barnes, carved up Seattle's 2-3-4 hitters with ease in the bottom of the inning, punctuating the comeback with strikeouts for the final two outs, the Red Sox had themselves their first win of the new season, 7-6, and avoided the ignominy of becoming the first Sox team to begin the year 0-2 since the dreaded Bobby Valentine Error.

"Down early and kept fighting,'' said Barnes, who notched his third career save. "I think that's a huge component of what this team does. We saw it a ton last year. We're never out of a game.''

"It felt,'' concluded Eduardo Nunez, "like this was a playoff game. That's a good feeling. We wanted that 'W' so bad.  We got back to who we are.''

Nobody, it should be noted, wanted it more than Nunez after he strangely pulled up halfway up the first base line, enabling reliever Cory Gearrin to begin an unusual inning-ending 1-2-3 double play.

In the clubhouse, the music blared and the mood was festive.

"It was definitely a big one,'' said Moreland, the primary hero. "You've got to get that first one out of the way, so we got that done. The energy's great right now, to get that first one in the fashion that we did.''

It was that energy that seemed to buoy them through most of last October, when typically, singular moments get magnified thanks to the stakes and the size of the stage.

Think back and you can recall a half-dozen huge moments that marked the team's postseason run: Andrew Benintendi's game-saving catch in Houston; Steve Pearce's monster homers in both Games 4 and 5 in Los Angeles. Eovaldi's marathon relief performance in Game 3; Nunez's sprawling play to end the ALDS in Yankee Stadium.

When the big moments presented themselves last October, the Sox were ready. So it was again Friday night.

Spring training is over. The games count now.

The last week had been uneven, with days off Sunday in Arizona and Wednesday here. The loss Thursday felt empty, with the team going down without much of a fight.

That wasn't who they were last year. On Friday, they signaled that it wouldn't who they were this year, either.

Friday was about getting back to business, about not giving in, about making every at-bat count. Trailing 6-1 after four innings didn't dissuade them. They put their heads down and scored six straight unanswered runs to take back a game that threatened to get away from them again.

"We're feeling good right now and ready to go tomorrow,'' said Moreland.

A day late perhaps, the Red Sox were back to work Friday.