For the third time this season, Ceddanne Rafaela homered on a Friday in a tied game in the 8th inning or later to give the Red Sox a win.
Here and there, throughout every baseball season, the sport gives you a series small gifts. They vary from fanbase to fanbase, and range in form from fun oddities that define random summer nights, to promise notes of something electrifying in the future.
Tonight, we got the latest in a series of promise notes with Ceddanne Rafaela’s eighth inning home run, which proved to be the decisive blow in a contest that had spent the three previous innings deadlocked 1-1. Here’s the highlight:
This moment at the first Fenway game of September comes on top of a pair of game winning, tenth inning home runs on the road in July and August. One was last week against the Tigers, and the other back on July 4th weekend against the Yankees.
While Rafaela is never going to be a top half of the order bat, he’s proving he has the characteristics of a guy who can do sneaky and consequential damage from the bottom half of the lineup. The guy with the below average OPS who will chase bad pitches in the early part of the game, but then has a flair for the dramatic and can pound a mistake if the pitcher isn’t locked in and overlooks the task at hand later in the game.
With the core of everyday players the Sox are building for 2025 and beyond, I’m excited to see what Rafaela can do in these spots and how he might continue to sneak up on opponents in the future.
But for now, let’s also revisit his aforementioned big home runs from earlier this summer:
Oddly enough, he was wearing his socks up high on all of these occasions.
As a side note, how about the guy who caught the ball? Not only was it a clean catch, but the celebration was also fantastic! I’d like to have a beer with him!
Studs
Ceddanne Rafaela, obviously.
Triston Casas, for this RBI single in the fourth inning that tied the game and gave the Red Sox their only other run of the night.
Nick Pivetta, for six innings of one run baseball that kept the game under control and laid the foundation for the Rafaela heroics.
Duds
Connor Wong, who went 0-3 and had the lowest WPA (-.119) of anybody on the team.
Jarren Duran, who went 0-4 from the top of the lineup.
The White Sox, who remain the biggest dud in the entire sport, and have now lost 110 games. This embarrassment of a team is now 5-43 in their last 48 games, and are a real threat to lose the most games of any MLB team in modern history. If the Red Sox manage to sweep them, they will be no more than four games out of a playoff spot on Monday as the Royals and Twins are playing each other this weekend. (Maybe even just three games back of Minnesota if Kansas City pulls off the sweep.)
