Category: Sports News

Updated Red Sox playoff odds after comeback vs. Rays extends win streak originally appeared on NBC Sports Boston

The Boston Red Sox extended their win streak to seven games Thursday night with a comeback victory over the Tampa Bay Rays at Fenway Park, and with a 50-45 record, they’re now five games over .500 for the first time all season.

The Red Sox trailed 3-1 going into the seventh inning and scored three runs. Veteran closer Aroldis Chapman came in for the ninth inning and earned his 16th save of the season to secure a 4-3 victory.

The Red Sox are tied with the Toronto Blue Jays and Houston Astros for the best record in baseball since June 7 at 20-10.

It’s not only one thing driving the Red Sox’ success. They lead the major leagues in runs scored with 172 since June 7, and they also have the best ERA (3.52) during that span. Top prospect Roman Anthony has a seven-game hit streak and the starting rotation is getting more consistently good starts from guys like Lucas Giolito and Brayan Bello.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of this streak is the Red Sox are doing it without one of their best players in Alex Bregman. The star third baseman hasn’t played since May 23 due to a quad injury, but he’s expected to return in this series against the Rays.

While this win streak has increased the optimism surrounding the Red Sox and their potential for the rest of the season, making the playoffs is still going to be a tough challenge.

The Red Sox entered Friday with a one-game lead over the Seattle Mariners for the third and final wild card playoff spot in the American League.

But according to FanGraphs’ model, the Red Sox still have a less than 50-50 chance to reach the postseason for the first time since 2021.

Why just a 41.3 percent chance to clinch a playoff berth?

Well, the Red Sox have the toughest remaining schedule of any team, with their opponents having a .519 combined win percentage this season, per Tankathon.

The Red Sox have benefited from an easy schedule the last couple weeks that included back-to-back series vs. the Washington Nationals and Colorado Rockies.

Boston’s schedule gets a lot tougher as the July 31 trade deadline approaches. The Red Sox have three more games in their current series versus the Rays, and they also have to play the Chicago Cubs, Philadelphia Phillies, Los Angeles Dodgers and Houston Astros through Aug. 3.

This 18-game stretch could easily determine the fate of this Red Sox team as far as its chances of making the playoffs.

One thing the front office can do to bolster the Red Sox’ chances of staying in the playoff race is being buyers at the trade deadline. Adding another impact starting pitcher would be a huge upgrade for the Red Sox.

Book excerpt: How Buster Posey foresaw Giants' record-breaking 2021 MLB season originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area

• Editor’s Note: Alex Pavlovic’s new book “The Franchise: San Francisco Giants: A Curated History of the Orange and Black,” landed on bookshelves Tuesday, July 8. The following is an excerpt regarding the team’s pursuit of Bryce Harper during the 2018-19 offseason. You can purchase the book HERE.

In the spring of 2020, the Giants opened the doors of their new $50 million spring training headquarters. The stunning 40,000 square foot building has a multi-floor weight room, a clubhouse with 10 TVs and mood lighting, and an event space that doubles as an indoor infield on rainy mornings.

There is a float tank for recovery and the booth that Mike Murphy used to eat at every night at Don & Charlie’s. On the third floor, two decks overlook the playing fields and offer stunning views of Camelback Mountain. A lounge is set up with ping-pong tables and leather couches for team meetings.

It was in that room that Buster Posey reset expectations for the 2021 Giants.

It had been five years since the organization’s last postseason appearance and the Giants finished with a losing record during the shortened 2020 season, which Posey opted out of. With their catcher back to lead a rebuilt starting staff, the Giants were internally optimistic about being in the thick of the Wild Card race.

There was no talk of winning the NL West, which had been taken eight consecutive times by the Dodgers. The new staff took a measured approach as camp kicked off, but Posey, as was so often said when he made a perfect throw down to second base, wasn’t having it. 

As the entire team met in the lounge on the first day of camp, Posey had a sense that expectations needed to change. He stood up and talked about the importance of going game by game, series by series, and he talked passionately about how the lineup should focus on becoming the toughest set of nine outs possible. Then he turned to the big picture.

Posey knew that each season gets broken up into sections and overlooked teams often waited to see how they were faring later in the summer before taking a serious run at a division crown. But he felt the group in front of him had the talent to be pretty good, and he thought it was important to get in front of that from day one.

“The bar is not to sneak into a Wild Card spot, the bar for us with the Giants is to go out and win the division. There’s freedom in that, I think. It’s like, ‘All right, here’s the standard,’ and it’s a high bar but I think it also leads to confidence,” Posey said later. “Guys are like, well, shoot, the manager and these players believe we can do this, instead of just thinking we’re going to try to sneak in. I think it kind of rallied the guys early. The first day of camp, it was like, ‘All right, we’ve got to set the bar high.’ ”

The short speech struck the right chord, although there were still plenty who viewed the climb as impossibly steep.

“I’d say probably half the people in the room would admit to taking that with a grain of salt, like, ‘Yeah, but the Dodgers …’ ” said backup catcher Curt Casali.

But Posey had reminded them that it was a challenge worth tackling.

“That was important for us. At that point, nobody had given us a chance for a few years — nobody ever picked us to be first in that division,” Brandon Belt said. “But to hear it out loud from a leader of the team, it gives everybody else a bunch of confidence and gets their head in the right space. He got me in the right frame of mind. We had a few veterans speak up. I think that meeting in spring training was the turning point for us that year.”

It was a message that was particularly powerful coming from a player, but Posey might not have fully grasped how important it was to shift the tone. He had not been in the clubhouse a summer earlier when players started having long conversations about how seemingly everything about the Giants was changing.

The new front office and staff embraced openers, platoons and cutting-edge training and recovery methods. The lingo changed, with manager Gabe Kapler talking of putting his arms in buckets. There were “bulk innings pitchers” but also “sprinters.” The Giants irritated fans by announcing their starting pitchers at the last possible moment and opposing managers rolled their eyes at how late the lineup card would be sent over.

At times it seemed the staff was trying to challenge every tradition and method the game of baseball had, and not always for the better. Early in the 2020 season, a few veterans called a team meeting after a game to make sure that, for the players, at least, the priority was always on winning games.

The next spring, that was made clear from the start. An unlikely goal had been set, and seven months later, when Posey caught a 97 mph fastball to end the regular season, he raised both arms and looked to the sky. It took everything they had, but the Giants had won the NL West, and done so in historic fashion.

They set a franchise record with 107 wins, edging the Dodgers by one game in the first divisional race in which both teams won at least 105 games. It was the closest race in MLB history, with the Giants becoming the first to win 107 games but clinch their division on the final day, and the Dodgers setting a record for wins by a second-place team. After 162 games, the Giants made good on a message that Posey teased publicly shortly after he spoke to teammates. 

“As much as I think the sports world loves to try to predict everything, there’s still some parts of it that can’t be predicted,” Posey told reporters at the start of camp. 

His team ended up becoming the greatest outlier in franchise history. In MLB history, that type of win total is generally preceded by years of postseason performances or tanking to stockpile top picks. But the Giants went 29-31 in 2020 and then came back the next year and spent 125 days with the best record in baseball. They got contributions from every corner of the roster, winning endlessly at the margins, something that president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi preached when ownership hired him in 2018.

If ever there was a time for the Giants to take a full step back and tear it down to the studs, that winter of 2018 had seemed to be it. The Giants had lost 98 games a season earlier and then doubled down with expensive trades, but they seemed allergic to the word “rebuild.”

Larry Baer interviewed 10 candidates to lead the baseball operations department, but Zaidi always was a frontrunner. He built a glowing reputation in Oakland and then Los Angeles, and his vision aligned with what the Giants’ board had always embraced. He had no interest in tearing things down.

“Our ownership group has always been constructed in a way that we want to try to win every year and also develop. That’s probably the hardest thing in sports to do,” Baer said. “Some teams have done that — the [New England] Patriots, the [San Antonio] Spurs, the [New York] Yankees to some extent — and our ownership group is aspirational about trying to do that. Farhan matched those aspirations. That’s really what it came down to.“

Perhaps the Giants should have taken a step back. That might have put them in a better position over the long haul, but with key veterans like Posey and the Brandons still in the lineup, that was never really an option. Over the previous four seasons, the Giants won just 45 percent of their games, with GM Bobby Evans getting dismissed. Over the following three seasons, they went 240-246, a run of mediocrity that cost Zaidi and Kapler their jobs.

But in the middle of it all is a remarkable 162-game season. For six months, just about everything went right.

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