Red Sox: I'm impressed

Saturday 8/1/26

This isn't the most important thing here, but I just want to say it: I love how Caleb Durbin plays baseball. That is a ballplayer. He picks it at third, he runs the bases with smarts, he understands what a situation requires, he drives the ball, he sacrifices, he bunts for hits. You play the game the right way, sir.

If this guy finishes at .250 with 18 homers and 65 RBI and wins a deserved Gold Glove, then that'll really be something after how he started. I was asking in these pages if he was a big league player and I'm seeing a guy who is a flat out winning player. There are guys who are just really good at helping you win games and Durbin is one of them.

Was just a short while ago that the prospect of a Red Sox-Dodgers series would have smacked of a lamb being led to the slaughter, but this is pretty cool now, right? It's as close to "must watch" as a Red Sox series has been during the summer months in a long time.

Friday's Red Sox win over the Dodgers was possibly the best of the year. LA is a damn good team. Sox went up 3-0, then fell behind 4-3 as it was getting late, Rafaela hits the big two-run job, the Sox add on (with bunts!), Bello does his job. What I wanted to see in this series was competitiveness. Can the Sox hang with this club? Close games, battling, not getting swept. That was a gutty, impressive win. These Red Sox are playing some ball.

And that's with Willson Contreras leaving the game early after getting beaned. He hit a big home run the night before in Sacramento against the Athletics and more than that, showed what a leader he is. Jarren Duran melted down, gesturing at Contreras--and this went on for a while--after the latter obeyed the third base coach and didn't try and tag and score on a shallow fly by Duran to the outfield.

After the game, Contreras said it wasn't personal, he had no problem with it, he loves Duran's competitiveness, etc. Whether he believes this or not doesn't matter. He handed the situation like a leader. He has been everything and more that they could have asked for. I didn't expect this from him, on the field or off.

Bello may end up being a legit weapon for the 2026 Red Sox. When Derek Lowe came over from Seattle, he'd pitch multiple innings out of the pen and circa 1999 was one of their more valuable assets in that role, even with their big stars. Lowe would throw three innings on a Monday, then two on Thursday, and that's how it went all year. Baseball is the best sport because it's the most like life. It's hard, but things can change fast. What looked one way on a given day is something else later. Allowing, of course, that you are open and stick with it.

This definitely isn't what Bello wanted (losing his starting job, and, of course, being sent down to the minors), but a great opportunity has presented itself. He can help the team and himself. Something special may be happening here, and it's not that often one gets to be a part of something special.

The Red Sox have had 126 seasons in their history, and July 2026 was the best month the team ever had with their 21-4 record. Look, it's sports. Anything can happen in sports. If you looked at the 2001 Patriots coming into that season, or after Drew Bledsoe went down, and some supernatural being with insider info in these things told you, "This team will win it all this year," you wouldn't have been able to accept that. At the same time, this is how it can go with sports. You know--well, if you do--both things at the same time, but it's still so...wow.

And that this team had a hotter summer month than the Morgan Magic Red Sox did in that amazing summer of 1988 is crazy. I've loved it. It's been a real shot in the arm. Sports aren't important in the grand scheme of things, but sometimes a team can give you a pick me up, especially when they're doing things that nobody saw coming.

Speaking of the late 1990s Red Sox: Nomar Garciaparra visited the NESN booth during the game. He looks good. Not a lot different from the time I saw him walking down Hanover Street here in the North End.

He's such a strange figure in Boston sports history. People usually aren't aware of this, but he played--and played a big part--in that famous--or infamous--Varitek-A-Rod fight game from 2004. Wasn't like the two fought, either, and the Sox put the hammer down. They needed a near miraculous rally at the end to pull a win out of their collective hats.

He was beloved. When I think about the players most beloved, at a given period in time, by the Fenway faithful, it's David Ortiz, Pedro Martinez, Luis Tiant, and Nomar Garciaparra. But then I feel like Garciaparra became...not a villain, but what people came to view--retroactively--as an obstacle to that first Word Series championship after eighty-six years. Tiant has passed, but those first two guys will always be received as the most beloved Red Sox at Fenway, and the same isn't true for Garciaparra.

Ted Williams is the greatest hitter, in my view, in the history of the sport. That's what he set out to become, and I believe he did it. But David Ortiz is the greatest Red Sox. In part because he's the greatest winner. He had that thing that Tom Brady and Michael Jordan had, and to a greater degree than any player in baseball history for my money. Actually, Garciaparra is similar to Bledsoe. Respected, someone to be warmly received, but if you were at Fenway in the late 1990s and early 2000s, that place got rockin' when Garciaparra stepped into the box like it had for very few others before or since.