BOSTON — In the bottom of the 13th inning, with the game tied and a crowd of 37,082 having sat through four hours of baseball that had already exhausted most of the ways a lead can be surrendered, Caleb Durbin hit a pitch from Erick Fedde into center field. Nick Sogard, placed at second base as the automatic runner, slid headfirst into home plate. The Red Sox won 12–11, their eighth straight game, and Durbin stood at first base looking at the dugout.
“Relief,” he said afterward. “We really wanted that one. I wanted that one bad, obviously we wanted that one. It’s just kind of one of those where you hope the ball falls your way, and we were able to pull that one out.”
The game that ended Thursday night at Fenway Park was, by nearly any measure, the most punishing win of a Boston summer that has produced many of them. The Red Sox trailed by four runs in the early innings. They tied the game in the ninth. They fell behind again in the tenth, when Aroldis Chapman surrendered a two-run home run, and tied it again. Then the eleventh. Then the twelfth. According to MLB.com, Boston became the first team in the modern era to score in five separate innings from the ninth onward in the same game, and still had to play four more innings after tying the score a final time before Durbin’s single ended it.
Chase Meidroth did not make it easy. The Chicago White Sox second baseman went 3-for-5 with two home runs and four RBIs, the kind of game that keeps a crowd in its seats past midnight and demands multiple responses from the team absorbing it. Every time Meidroth put Chicago back in front, Boston found a way to erase it. The 4-hour, 23-minute game was the longest in the pitch-clock era for the Red Sox organization.
Connor Wong started the comeback. The Boston catcher connected on a two-run homer in the third inning to pull the Red Sox from a 4–0 deficit, the first indication that Thursday night would not resolve cleanly the way its early innings suggested. Wong finished 2-for-3 with a double and two RBIs, a quiet performance that carried weight because it came before the chaos that followed.
Chapman’s tenth inning was the kind of moment that tests a team’s definition of itself. The closer had been among Boston’s most reliable relievers during their recent run, and his two-run concession threatened to put the game out of reach. Instead, the Red Sox tied it again, and kept tying it through the eleventh and twelfth, building something that looked less like momentum and more like a refusal to let the scoreboard have the final word.
Durbin has been the axis around which Boston’s offensive reliability rotates. Over his last 11 games, he is batting .390, going 16-for-41 with three doubles, a home run, and seven RBIs, per CBS Sports. On Thursday he went 3-for-6 with a walk and a double, scoring twice before delivering the walk-off single. The hit itself was unremarkable in its execution, a pitch met squarely and sent up the middle. The 13 innings that preceded it were what made it matter.
Sogard, who scored the winning run, has been part of this story longer than one late-season sprint. He was recalled from Triple-A Worcester in late July after Curtis Mead broke his wrist on his first night as a Red Sox player, filling a roster spot that became available on the cruelest possible timeline. That he now represents the winning run in one of Boston’s most complex games of the summer tells a quieter version of the same story Durbin’s single tells loudly.
The streak is now eight games. Since July 3, Boston is 26-3. Since June 25, 31-5. The Red Sox have won 10 consecutive series, approaching the 1912 franchise record of 11, set by a team that played in the dead-ball era, never faced a pitch clock, and occupied a different version of this city. Interim manager Chad Tracy was asked to rank Thursday’s game among Boston’s wins this season.
“It ranks at the top of the list,” Tracy said.
Backup catcher Jake Rogers, whose role on this team is to hold things together in moments that test patience rather than production, offered the word that has defined the streak. “Relentless,” Rogers said.
That description has stayed consistent across every iteration of this run. When the Red Sox set the franchise record with their 15th consecutive win in late July, it came against a Baltimore team in first place and required similar accumulation rather than a single burst of production. The current eight-game run is a different configuration of the same quality: teams in the way eventually stop finding extra innings, and Boston has not shown the capacity to stop before they do.
Jarren Duran has been part of this version of Boston since late June, when his tenth-inning single finished a four-game sweep of the Yankees that reset expectations for what the Red Sox were. He is part of the roster that makes this streak possible and part of the context that makes each new win feel like an extension of something rather than an isolated result.
What remains open is how this run ends and when. The 1912 franchise record of 11 consecutive series wins lives in a time the modern sport has no direct comparison for. The Red Sox need one more series win to approach it and two to match it. They play the Oakland Athletics starting Friday.
They also have a roster that has responded to being behind after the ninth inning in each of the last several games and found a way to win. The math of that is not sustainable indefinitely. The pattern, until Thursday night, had been reliable enough that Durbin’s walk-off single felt less like a rescue and more like the next installment in a story that has not found its ending yet. Fedde threw the pitch. Sogard slid. The scoreboard said 12–11. Boston had another one.
