Red Sox just keep coming back, and Rafaela's slam proves it

Tyler Soderstrom made sure the Athletics got out of the gate first, taking Boston deep early to put Oakland on the board. It looked like the start of another road grind for a Red Sox team that's been living on late-game chaos all summer.

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Tyler Soderstrom wastes no time giving the As the lead

Boston didn't have an answer for a while, either. The Red Sox went hitless through 5 innings, per MLB.com, before Connor Wong finally broke through with a leadoff double in the 6th. From there it snowballed fast: Willson Contreras and Wilyer Abreu both walked with 2 outs, loading the bases for Rafaela against Jose Suarez.

What happened next is the kind of thing that gets replayed for a while. Rafaela squared one up, and by his own admission afterward, he thought he'd just hit a routine flyout. Instead the ball snuck over the fence at Sutter Health Park for his 11th homer of the season, and his first career grand slam, flipping a deficit into a 4-1 Boston lead in a single swing.

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First career grand slam for Ceddanne Rafaela and look at the Sox! They’re doing it AGAIN!

The final score landed at 4-2, all 4 Boston runs coming off that one swing. It's a small line in the box score that means a lot in the bigger picture: the Red Sox improved to 23-4 since June 25 and are now 10-0 on this road trip, an absurd stretch for a team that started the year 32-46. Nobody circles a mid-July game against Oakland on the calendar, but this version of the Red Sox has turned every game into appointment viewing.

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Ceddanne Rafaela GRAND SLAM

None of this fixes the disaster that was Boston's first three months. But a team that couldn't buy a break in April is now the one other clubs don't want to face in the 6th inning. Rafaela, a 25-year-old who's built his reputation more on glove work and speed than raw power, just added a career first to his resume in the middle of the hottest run the Red Sox have had all year. If this pace holds, that grand slam won't be the last moment from this stretch people are still talking about come October.