Fenway Park's record books needed a rewrite Thursday night, and the Elias Sports Bureau had to double-check its own database before believing what it was seeing. The Boston Red Sox didn't just beat the Chicago White Sox 12-11 in 13 innings - they did something no team in the 150-year history of Major League Baseball had ever done. According to Elias, Boston became the first team in MLB history to score in five consecutive innings in the ninth inning or later. Let that sink in. Five straight frames of must-score baseball, five straight answers. Nobody in the history of the sport has ever done that, and the Red Sox did it on a random Thursday in August like it was routine.
A 4-Hour, 23-Minute Masterpiece of Refusing to Lose
The final scene: Caleb Durbin lined a single to center field off Erick Fedde in the 13th inning to score Nick Sogard, capping a back-and-forth war that lasted 4 hours, 23 minutes - the second-longest game of the pitch clock era. The White Sox led 7-6 entering the ninth. Boston tied it. Then tied it again. And again. And again. Four straight innings of late-game heroics before Durbin's walk-off. Connor Wong blasted a two-run homer, Anthony Seigler drove in three, Wilyer Abreu added two RBIs including the ninth-inning tying hit, and Andruw Monasterio doubled in two more. It took nine Boston pitchers to get there - Brayan Bello, the last man standing, worked two innings for the win - against eight Chicago arms. Willson Contreras was out sick for a second straight game, the rotation is held together with tape (Ranger Suarez needed 42 pitches to escape one inning), and it still didn't matter. Interim manager Chad Tracy summed it up: "It was unbelievable. They just did not want to lose."
This Isn't a Streak. It's a Statement.
Strip away the theatrics and the numbers underneath are genuinely absurd. Eight straight wins. Ten of their last 11. Ten consecutive series wins - a month and a half of never losing a series. They have 13 straight wins against teams that entered the game with a winning record, tied for the longest such streak in the expansion era, and they've swept six series against first-place teams, a single-season expansion-era record. At 63-51, Boston sits third in a brutal AL East, but this team is playing like the best team in the league right now - and the schedule says the scariest part is that it's not a mirage built on weak sisters. The White Sox came in as an AL Central leader. The Red Sox swept them anyway. "We're so deep right now," Durbin said. "We trust everyone to be bench guys to whatever our lineup is. It's special right now. It's a fun group to be a part of. This game, if anything, exemplifies who we are now. There's never any doubt."
The Hot Take: Stop Waiting for the Collapse
Here's the part of this column where we're supposed to hedge. Nine pitchers a night. Four-hour games. An interim manager. A rotation that can't get through the fifth cleanly. The analytics crowd will tell you this is unsustainable, that regression is coming, that the bullpen is a ticking time bomb. Stop it. That's 2025 thinking, and it's exactly wrong about this team. October is a parade of one-run games. Every postseason series is decided in the eighth inning or later, and Boston has turned the late innings into a science - not a coin flip. The Elias record isn't luck; it's structure. This lineup runs nine deep (the deadline addition of Adley Rutschman made it deeper), the bench produces every single night, and the bullpen, chaotic as it looks, keeps making the pitch when the game is on the line. Teams that win 12-11 in 13 innings in August are the teams that win 3-2 in Game 5 in October - not because of talent, but because they've already lived every version of that moment. The Red Sox are the AL's most dangerous playoff team, and it's not particularly close. The Yankees are waiting on Aaron Judge's rib. The AL East leaders have bullpen questions of their own. Boston is the only contender in the American League that wins the games it has no business winning.
The Prediction
The Oakland Athletics (45-70) roll into Fenway this weekend, which means the streak is almost certainly going to nine - and honestly, watch for double digits. But the real prediction is bigger. Book it now: the Red Sox will play a one-run game in October, fall behind in the eighth, and win it anyway. The "unluckiest bullpen in baseball" narrative dies in the ALDS, and the comeback kings play deep into October. Because when a team scores in five straight late innings, it stops being a hot streak. It becomes an identity.
Lauren Mitchell
Lauren Mitchell covers sports with a focus on roster movement, coaching trends, player development, and the bigger storylines behind each matchup.