Sox ran out of fight in ALCS
HOUSTON — Backs against the wall — occasionally by their own doing — these Boston Red Sox proved hard to pin down.
The Houston Astros finally got them for good Friday night.
Boston’s bats went quiet for the third straight game and the Red Sox bowed out of the AL Championship Series with a punchless 5-0 loss to the Astros in Game 6.
They had just two hits Friday, baffled by starter Luis Garcia and a quartet of relievers, and combined for just three runs and 10 hits over the final three games of the series.
The wild-card Red Sox arrived in Houston needing consecutive victories to avoid elimination and keep alive their pursuit of another World Series title after winning in 2018.
“We don’t quit,” catcher Christian Vazquez vowed.
Instead, they barely showed up.
Such a muted dismissal hardly fit with the rest of the team’s season. This was a club with a knack for exceeding expectations — even when they were the ones undercutting their own chances.
Boston was hardly projected as an October favorite entering the year. Manager Alex Cora was fired prior to the 2020 season for his involvement in Houston’s 2017 cheating scandal, and Mookie Betts was salary dumped to the Dodgers a month later. No surprise, then, when Boston sank to last place in the AL East in 2020.
Even with Cora rehired in November, little better was expected this spring. Instead, the Red Sox emerged rejuvenated and ready to challenge for a postseason spot, leading the division for much of the first half behind resurgent stars Xander Bogaerts and Rafael Devers, plus free-agent acquisition Kike Hernandez.
Nathan Eovaldi emerged
as a Cy Young Award contender, Eduardo Rodriguez rebounded from a COVIDrelated heart illness that kept him out of 2020, and ace Chris Sale was expected back in the second half after two years gone following Tommy John surgery.
A COVID-19 outbreak in the clubhouse threatened to derail that rolling start.
Just six teams failed to reach MLB’s 85% vaccination threshold for relaxing safety protocols, and the Red Sox were one of them. So when the virus began to spread around the clubhouse in late August, it led to a dozen players and two support staffers being sidelined after positive tests.
Those forced out of action included Hernandez, Bogaerts and Sale. The team slumped and nearly fell out of the playoff picture, but a seven-game winning streak in mid-September rekindled its wild-card charge. Boston won four of its final five games to clinch a postseason berth on the last day of the regular season.
Suddenly, the Sox were unstoppable.
Boston throttled Yankees ace Gerrit Cole to win the wild-card game, batted .341 as a team while pounding the top-seeded Rays 3-1 in the Division Series, and began a similar clobbering of Houston in the ALCS by winning Games 2 and 3 by a combined 21-8.
“We just got beat at the
end, but when we look back and everything that we went through, the thoughts of this team early in the season, it’s just amazing,” Cora said. “It was a great year.”
The October-tested Astros got their pitching in order and began stifling the red-hot Sox in Game 4. Boston dropped that one 9-2, lost 9-1 a day later and fell into a 3-2 series hole heading to Houston for Game 6.
“We’ve had our backs against the wall all year long,” Hernandez said Friday afternoon. “We’ve been battling, we’ve been grinding all year long, and we didn’t get to this point to go out without a battle.” The fight never came. For the second straight game, they were held hitless through four innings, this time by Garcia, who didn’t allow a knock until Hernandez’s triple with two outs in the sixth.
Starter Nathan Eovaldi kept it close. The AL Cy Young Award contender threw 4 1/3 effective innings, including a gutsy fourth when he struck out two with runners at second and third, then got an inningending punchout of Chas McCormick after an intentional walk of Yuli Gurriel loaded the bases.
“No one expected us to be here,” Eovaldi said. “We proved a lot of people wrong.”