The Red Sox are moving on.
With Kike Hernandez walk-off sac-fly, Boston ended the Rays’ reign atop the American League and punched their ticket to the ALCS for the second time in the past four years.
“You’re going to have a chance to win the game, and you can’t let this situation get too big,” said Hernandez, when asked about his approach for that at-bat. “You’re about to win this game, so you need to work on slowing everything down and slowing your breathing down and slowing the game down and starting early and making sure that you see the pitch, and you’re not just swinging at your shoes for no reason for trying to be a hero.”
Hernandez stayed in the moment and delivered for the Red Sox, scoring Danny Santana from third and setting off a celebration at Fenway.
“There was Kike, and Renfroe, and then I was under there, just giving body punches,” said Alex Verdugo.
The Sox jumped out to a 5-0 lead, but Tampa Bay began to chip away in the middle innings, coming to within 5-3 on Wander Franco’s two-run homer. And in the eighth, they tallied two more off reliever Ryan Brasier to tie the game at five.
But Boston called on Garrett Whitlock after Brasier’s exit, and the young right-hander shut down the Rays in the eighth and followed that up with a scoreless ninth, setting up a chance for the Sox to walk off.
“People still call him the secret weapon,” Hernandez said. “It’s no secret anymore. Garrett Whitlock is legit. That’s an electric arm with three-plus pitches at his age, with his experience coming into this year. It’s not every day that a Rule 5 Draft pick gets to close out a Wild Card game and then win a game that wins a playoff series.”
Whitlock was picked up by the Red Sox from the Yankees this past offseason in the rule five draft. Everything came full circle in the Wild Card game when Whitlock closed out his former club to send Boston to the ALDS.
Now Boston moves onto the ALCS, and they’ll await the winner of the White Sox, Astros series to see whether they’ll travel to Houston or Chicago. They’ll be underdogs, but that’s fine with them.
“Not too many people gave us a chance from the get-go, but we believed,” said Cora. “We always said that we had a good baseball team that had some holes, and we still have some holes, but at the end, for how bad it looked sometimes, we’re still here.”
