For about 30 seconds, this looked like one of those losses that haunts a bullpen for a week. Wyatt Olds struck out Javier Sanoja for what should've been the final out of the 10th with Boston up 3-2, only for the pitch to skip past catcher Connor Wong and let the automatic runner race home and tie it. Instead of a clean win, the Red Sox were suddenly staring at extra innings against a Marlins team they had no business letting back into it.
OH NO RED SOX
Dave Portnoy's reaction to the sequence was blunt, and honestly fair to Olds even while calling the result a disaster: "Olds pitched his dick off. Ghost runner and shoulda gotten 4 outs without letting the runner score". That's the accurate read here -- Olds got the punchout that should've ended it, and the ball squirting away wasn't really on him. It just meant Boston needed someone else to bail the bullpen out.
That someone was Jarren Duran. In the top of the 11th with the game still knotted at 3-3, Duran turned on an 80.4 mph sweeper and sent it 412 feet at 105 mph off the bat, a grand slam that instantly flipped a tie game into a 7-3 lead. It was reportedly his second career grand slam, and it came on a night he'd otherwise gone 0-for-4 with two strikeouts.
JARREN DURAN GRAND SLAM
The scoreboard swing was the kind of thing that stops a broadcast in its tracks -- BOS 3, MIA 3 one pitch, BOS 7, MIA 3 the next. A tracker clip caught the ball landing in a crowded section beyond the outfield wall as Marlins fans scrambled for the souvenir.
JARREN DURAN GRAND SLAM IN THE 11TH
Not everyone was ready to let the near-disaster go, even after the walk-off swing bailed the bullpen out. Eric Hubbs summed up the whiplash of the night with, "I'd file that under one of the worst losses of the season" -- a reminder that a game Boston ultimately won still featured a meltdown bad enough to get filed under the loss column in fans' heads.
The win reportedly stretched Boston's streak to 5 straight, which makes the whole sequence easier to laugh about now than it was in the moment. But it's also a preview of a real fault line for this team down the stretch: a bullpen that can get soft-contact outs and still find a way to give a run back, bailed out by a lineup that has enough thunder to erase it. That formula wins games in August. It's a lot scarier to lean on in October.