Nine outs away from going six feet under for the season, the Red Sox showed much more than a pulse late in the ALCS Game 5 last night.
The Sox roared back to the prime of life, their 8-7 victory over the Rays at Fenway Park causing heartbeats to surge up and down the Eastern seaboard and sending a shiver of dread through the Tampa Bay area. Down 7-0 after 6 innings in Game 5 of an ALCS in which they trailed 3-1, the Red Sox staged the biggest comeback ever in an League Championship Series game by a winning team, putting a fresh spin on the meaning of a near-death experience in the process.
The Sox scored four times in the seventh, three coming home on a David Ortiz home run and added three more in the eighth to tie, two on a J.D Drew homer and the tying run on Coco Crisp’s two-out RBI single before Drew hit a walkoff RBI single in the ninth that literally caused Fenway to rock and sway.
The tone in the dugout before the Ortiz blast was not as down as it could have been, Crisp said, considering how close the Sox were to elimination.
Game 6 is on the schedule for tomorrow night in St. Petersburg, Fla., with Josh Beckett starting for the Sox opposite James Shields in an attempt to even the series and send it to a Game 7 on Sunday night at Tropicana Field. The Rays are still one win away from the World Series but momentum definitely slipped out of their grasp and into the Red Sox’ lap with the loss.
The Red Sox had been utterly punchless through six scoreless innings against Scott Kazmir (two hits, three walks, seven strikeouts), while Daisuke Matsuzaka struggled (four-plus innings, two walks, five hits, three home runs, five runs). The Rays pushed their lead to 7-0 in the seventh inning on B.J. Upton’s two-run double off of Jonathan Papelbon, who then settled in to get the game to Justin Masterson (1-0) for the ninth.
