In the heady days of April and May, wins like the Red Sox pulled out Friday night were almost routine. Back when they were still the surprise team of the first half of the season, the Red Sox would win games they shouldn't, come out of nowhere to snatch a victory no one saw coming.
Each time it happened, the Sox would bank the win and use it to fuel a winning streak, or at the very least, provide some short-term momentum. Their confidence seemed to grow nightly.
Then, around the start of July, those kinds of wins stopped. The bullpen failed to secure leads. The lineup went inexplicably cold. The rotation failed to keep them in games.
And so, for a long time, they have bobbed along, barely afloat, drifting further out of the division race.
But on Friday, the magic came back.
In the top of the eighth inning, Jonathan Arauz, who had started his day at Triple-A -- a few hours away in Buffalo -- rode to the rescue with a three-run homer, turning a two-run deficit into an improbable one-run lead. Garrett Richards, another unlikely hero, steamrolled the top third of the Cleveland lineup in the eighth, and the Red Sox had snared a 4-3 victory that felt an awful lot like those early-season wins which had imbued them with confidence.
"It was a cool game,'' said Alex Cora. "It was a fun game to manage with what we had, to be around the guys and grind together.''
Even before they took the field, the Red Sox found themselves in crisis mode. Kike Hernandez tested positive for COVID, with Christian Arroyo deemed a close contact and quarantined. And just like that, the virus claimed the team's top two options at second base,
A panicked call for reinforcements brought in Arauz and Worcester teammate Yairo Munoz, with both plugged into the lineup -- if they arrived in time and passed all their intake protocols, that is. They did, but the team didn't release a lineup until minutes before gametime -- so precarious was their manpower situation.
It was that kind of day.
With their roster finally at a full 26, the Sox showed little energy, perhaps owing at least somewhat to a 3 a.m. arrival into Cleveland. For seven innings, they had one hit among them -- a two-out double from Bobby Dalbec. The one run they scored was almost an accident, since Alex Verdugo should have been thrown out trying to advance from second to third, but made it safely with an errant throw from shortstop Amed Rosario allowed him to slide in safely. He then scored on a double play.
But in the eighth, the Sox mounted their come-from-behind effort. It culminated with the second big league homer ever for Arauz, but only after he twice failed to get down a sacrifice bunt designed to move the runners over.
So, to summarize: the Red Sox took their first lead of the night thanks to a player who had begun the day in the minors and only swung away because he couldn't properly execute a simple bunt.
If all that wasn't improbable enough, the Sox then got a terrific shutdown inning from Garrett Richards, who only a few weeks ago pitched himself out of a rotation spot and seemed destined for little more than mop-up work in one-sided games. Instead, Richards dominated the top three hitters in the Cleveland lineup, turning the ball over to closer du jour, Adam Ottavino.
"It felt good,'' said Cora. "We grinded today. It's very gratifying when kids like Jonathan come up (and come through). Those are fun. That's why I do this, to enjoy stuff like this. I know I suffer, and I get frustrated, but this is very gratifying. Games like this, it's like, 'Yeah...this is why we battle...this is what we do.''
What's not known for now is whether a win like this can have the same galvanizing effect in the heat of a playoff race that they did earlier this season.
"Sometimes it's hard to tell in the moment,'' said Ottavino. "For sure, sometimes you look back on it (later) and say, 'That win really got us going in the right direction.' Hopefully, this is one of those. I like the way we're competing and I think our best baseball is still ahead of us.''
"I don't want to say we needed this one,'' said Cora. "But it felt awesome to pull this one out.''
They're all big at this point, late in the season. Even the ones that remind of you April and May, when the finish line seemed a long, long way away.