BOSTON – Aroldis Chapman walked off the Fenway Park mound having just allowed two runs in the ninth inning, converting a two-run Boston lead into a tie, and by every pattern the Red Sox had established through a brutal June, the game was over. Wilyer Abreu had thrown the ball into the outfield on a play that should have ended the rally. The Yankees had life. The Red Sox, in most games this season, would have sat down quietly in the tenth.
Jarren Duran lined a single into the outfield with two runners on in the bottom of the tenth, Anthony Seigler scored, and Boston finished off a 5-4 win that completed a four-game sweep of the Yankees and delivered the best weekend of their 2026 season.
The sweep was framed by Sonny Gray’s near-miss. Gray carried a no-hitter into the eighth inning, the longest such bid by a Red Sox pitcher against New York since Bob Ojeda in 1981, before Amed Rosario singled to center to end it. Gray finished with one hit allowed, a walk, and nine strikeouts. The ninth strikeout was his 2,000th career punchout, making him the 92nd pitcher in major league history to reach the milestone, delivered against the team his performance nearly broke in front of a Fenway crowd that got louder with every hitless inning.
The Yankees arrived at Fenway with the best record in the American League, having won eight straight games at the park. They left one game behind Tampa Bay for the division lead, outscored 21-9 across the four games per ESPN, and their manager reduced to describing the trip as crappy. Aaron Boone said after the finale that his team has a “really good frickin team.” It does. It was not good enough at Fenway this weekend, in part because Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton were both absent due to injury, and in part because Boston’s pitching staff was not interested in who was or was not in the opposing lineup.
The series had been a procession before Sunday turned complicated. Connelly Early struck out nine in the 6-3 opener. Payton Tolle retired the first 16 batters he faced in the 6-1 win in Game 2. Game 3 closed 4-1 with Caleb Durbin homering to break a tie and the rotation handling a shorthanded New York lineup with little drama. Willson Contreras put one over the Green Monster and out of Fenway entirely across the four games, the kind of image that stays with a series.
Then came the sequence that tested whether any of it meant something. Gray was cruising through eight innings of a Sunday afternoon that had the whole stadium on its feet. Rosario ended the no-hitter. Gray came out. The bullpen held a 2-0 lead into the ninth. Chapman entered to close it and gave two runs back, aided by Abreu’s throwing error on a play that extended the inning. The Yankees were tied. Fenway went quiet in the way blown saves make stadiums go quiet, and the Red Sox walked into the tenth needing to write a different ending than the ones they had been producing through most of June.
Seigler led off the tenth with an RBI single. Tsung-Che Cheng added a sacrifice fly. Duran lined the third run home, and Boston finished with a margin it did not give back. “I let a little bit off my shoulders,” Duran said after the game, an honest description of what one walk-off feels like in the middle of a season that has asked this franchise to absorb a lot.
Interim manager Chad Tracy framed the night in terms of what it was not. “Even though we gave up a couple of runs, the energy in the dugout coming in was like, ‘Let’s go win the game,'” Tracy said. “There’s been times here in the past couple of months where that would have kind of crushed us, but that was not the case. They were fired up to try and get that done.” The distinction he was drawing is real: a team absorbing losses and a team fighting back from them are different organisms, and which one the Red Sox are has been the central question of their season.
Boston came into this series in last place in the AL East. This is their first four-game winning streak of 2026, and it came against a team that had been the division’s best before landing at Logan Airport. The Yankees had been winning games like this all month, finding runs late and holding leads in extra innings. This weekend reversed the pattern entirely.
Gray’s season ERA sits at 2.69 through 15 starts. The near-no-hitter is the headline, but the number that matters for Boston’s pitching picture is the consistency behind it: the rotation has had to carry more weight since Garrett Crochet landed on the injured list, and Gray has been its most reliable piece through the back half of June.
Whether four games against a shorthanded division rival constitutes a turning point or a pleasant interruption in a difficult season is a question only July can answer. The Red Sox return to the AL East standings still trailing four teams. What they have now that they did not have a week ago is a first-place team’s scalp, a four-game winning streak, and a tenth-inning game they did not fold in the way they have been folding. Boone, for his part, is not panicking. His team will be fine. Whether Boston will be is still an open question, but this weekend at least gave them a reason to believe the answer might be yes.
