Red Sox turn Dodger Stadium into their personal batting cage

The Red Sox didn't just beat the Dodgers three times in Chavez Ravine, they made the reigning World Series favorites look overmatched doing it. Rafaela was the engine, going deep in three consecutive at-bats across the series and turning a trip to LA into a personal highlight reel.

Barstool Baseball

@StoolBaseball

Ceddane Rafaela last 3 at bats HR HR HR

It kept going. A night later Rafaela was at it again, this time with a 388-foot blast at 104 mph off the bat that tied the game 3-3, per the on-screen exit velo readout. That's not a fluke swing path, that's a guy locked in against one of the best pitching staffs in baseball on the road.

Barstool Baseball

@StoolBaseball

Ceddane can’t stop hitting dingers

The Sox didn't stop at Rafaela. Boston strung together a 3-homer inning off the Dodgers, with Wilyer Abreu and Masataka Yoshida joining Rafaela in going deep to blow the game open. Per the Boston Globe, Rafaela finished the series 7-for-14 with four homers and five RBIs, and Yoshida added a homer and two RBIs of his own as Boston won its fifth straight game. Boston entered the series on a stretch of 23-3 since July 3, and the Dodgers stretch just kept the roll going.

By the time the series wrapped with an 8-4 final, the reaction from Barstool's corner of the internet had shifted from surprise to full-blown bandwagon energy. Dave Portnoy summed up the vibe succinctly, waking up every morning to another Red Sox win and treating it like clockwork, before going further and declaring he'd been wrong to doubt this team entirely.

Dave Portnoy

@stoolpresidente

Hand up: I was wrong about this Red Sox team

The bigger context makes the sweep sting even more for LA. This came right as Boston chief baseball officer Craig Breslow was gearing up for a busy MLB trade deadline, and the position players had just handed him a mandate. Breslow didn't sit on his hands, landing All-Star catcher Adley Rutschman in a package that shipped out top prospects Anthony Eyanson, Kyson Witherspoon and Enddy Azocar, along with catcher Carlos Narvaez, while also adding reliever Erik Miller and outfielder Eli White in separate deals. The roster the Sox trot out the rest of the way looks a lot different than the one that started the Dodgers series.

Whether Boston can sustain this heater into October is the real question, but for now the Red Sox have quietly built one of the best records in baseball and just embarrassed a Dodgers team most people penciled in for a title. Rafaela, a 25-year-old who broke in as a glove-first shortstop/center fielder, is suddenly punishing baseballs at a rate nobody projected — and Breslow just gave him and the rest of this lineup real reinforcements to work with down the stretch.