Boston Red Sox Tie an 80-Year-Old Record With 15 Straight Wins and Crash the Wild-Card Race

On the first of July, the Boston Red Sox were 37-48, sitting in the AL East basement, and playing the kind of baseball that gets a front office thinking about August selloffs. Three weeks later, they own a piece of franchise history. Boston ran its winning streak to 15 straight games on Wednesday afternoon, matching the club record set by Ted Williams and the 1946 pennant winners, before finally losing in the nightcap of a doubleheader against Baltimore. The streak was the longest in the majors since the Cardinals ripped off their September run in 2021, and it has done something almost nobody saw coming: it has turned a last-place team into a legitimate wild-card club with less than two weeks to go before the trade deadline.

The Week That Was: Six Wins, a Rainout, and One Thud

Boston came out of the All-Star break carrying a nine-game winning streak and picked up right where it left off. Friday brought a doubleheader against first-place Tampa Bay, and the Red Sox treated it like a demolition. Jake Bennett threw six innings of one-hit ball in a 10-0 laugher in the opener, with a six-run sixth inning breaking it open and Carlos Narvaez adding a solo shot. In the nightcap, Wilyer Abreu homered twice and Willson Contreras went deep in the first inning of a 5-3 win, with six relievers combining for zero runs and zero walks. That sweep pushed the record to 48-48, the first time Boston had touched .500 since the opening weekend of the season.

Saturday was the escape act, a 7-6 comeback win over the Rays that stretched the streak to 12. Sunday's 6-1 victory completed a four-game sweep, with Sonny Gray spinning six innings of one-run ball to improve to a ridiculous 12-1 and Contreras launching a two-run homer. The Red Sox even scored three runs in the third inning without recording a hit, the first time they had pulled that off since 2015. Gray summed up the mood at Fenway afterward: "The fans were electric for us this weekend. I'm getting chills."

Baltimore came to town Monday and nearly ended the party, but Caleb Durbin's go-ahead homer in the eighth delivered a 6-5 win and number 14. After a Tuesday rainout, Wednesday's makeup doubleheader gave Boston the record-tying 15th: a 6-3 win behind Jarren Duran's two-run triple and sacrifice fly, Durbin's two-run single, and a Ceddanne Rafaela solo shot over the Monster. Bennett grinded through 5 2/3 innings — and took a line drive off the stomach in the fifth — while Aroldis Chapman closed it out for his 23rd save. Then came the thud. In the nightcap, Eduardo Rivera recorded just two outs while allowing four first-inning runs, Kyle Bradish held Boston to one run over six, and the Orioles won 5-1 to stop the streak at 15. A record tied, not broken, and a 52-49 record that still would have sounded like fiction a month ago.

Standout Performances Fueling the Boston Red Sox Surge

Contreras has been the engine. The veteran slugger is hitting .285/.379/.542 with 20 home runs, he homered in four of seven games entering the weekend, and per NESN he leads the majors with 20 multi-RBI games while slugging .800 over the last 15 days. Gray's 12-1 record makes him one of the best stories in the American League, and Bennett quietly won twice in six days, including that one-hitter of an outing against Tampa Bay. Durbin has been the unlikely hero of the Baltimore series, posting an .815 OPS with three homers over the last two weeks and delivering the biggest swing of Monday's win.

The pitching staff deserves as much credit as anyone. NESN notes that Boston's rotation options — Connelly Early, Payton Tolle, Gray, and Ranger Suarez — have all posted ERAs of 3.15 or better with strikeout rates above eight per nine, and the team ERA sits in the top ten in baseball. The late-inning trio of Garrett Whitlock, Tyron Guerrero, and Chapman has been close to untouchable, and Chapman recently broke the all-time MLB relief strikeout record, per NESN, while continuing to slam doors at age 38.

Where the Red Sox Stand in the AL East

The climb has been steep but the hole was deep. At 52-49, Boston sits third in the AL East behind Tampa Bay and New York, roughly six and a half games off the division lead as the week closed. The more realistic prize is the wild card, and that picture is genuinely good: the Red Sox hold the AL's third wild-card spot, with Cleveland a bit ahead of them and Seattle chasing from behind. ESPN's Jeff Passan noted mid-week that Boston's playoff probability had climbed to around 44 percent, a number that was buried in single digits when the calendar flipped to July.

The manager's chair is its own storyline. The organization fired Alex Cora after a 10-17 start, and interim manager Chad Tracy has now become, per the AP, the first skipper since the 19th century to guide a team to a 15-game winning streak without holding the job on opening day. "It's cool that they've accomplished something great," Tracy said after the record-tying win, in the understated tone that has defined his tenure so far.

Injuries and Roster News

The week's most notable move involved the bullpen. Boston recalled right-hander Zack Kelly from Triple-A Worcester and immediately placed him on the 60-day injured list with elbow inflammation; per MLB Trade Rumors, he has a stress reaction in his olecranon bone but is not expected to need surgery. The move left the 40-man roster at 39, which conveniently creates space for a deadline addition. The current injury picture:

• Zack Kelly, RHP — 60-day IL, elbow stress reaction; surgery not expected
• Trevor Story, SS — 60-day IL; would need a 40-man spot to return this season
• Ranger Suarez, LHP — sidelined, per the Boston Globe, clouding the rotation picture
• Connelly Early, LHP — also out, thinning the starting depth behind Bennett, Gray, and Tolle

Trade Deadline: Buyers, Sellers, or Something in Between

Chief baseball officer Craig Breslow is playing it coy ahead of the August 3 deadline, and given where this team was three weeks ago, you can understand why. Passan reported that Boston's plans are "fluid" and that the front office "isn't discounting pursuing help," while cautioning that "15 games does not a season make." The reported shopping priority is a right-handed bat. If the bottom somehow falls out, earlier reports floated Chapman, Gray, Contreras, and Whitlock as potential trade chips — though Jon Morosi has since reported that a Chapman deal is increasingly unlikely given the club's rising postseason odds. Breslow, for his part, cited his Cubs experience of watching a hot streak flip a deadline plan, and said only that "more time means we can get more information." Treat all of it as reporting, not fact, but the arrow is clearly pointing toward buying.

What's Next for the Boston Red Sox

The schedule offers a chance to bank wins before things get serious. Here is the road ahead:

• July 24-26: vs. Toronto Blue Jays at Fenway Park — a last-place division opponent Boston should handle
• July 27-30: at the Athletics, a four-game set against another sub-.500 club
• July 31-August 2: at the Los Angeles Dodgers, the measuring-stick series that closes the trip

Seven of the next ten come against teams below .500, and the Dodgers series lands right on top of the deadline, which should make for an interesting weekend of scoreboard-watching and rumor-refreshing.

The 2026 Boston Red Sox spent half a season testing their fans' patience and three weeks repaying it with interest. The streak is over, and the schedule will eventually stop being polite. But a team that was 11 games under .500 on July 1 now controls a playoff spot, has a front office hunting for a right-handed bat instead of shopping its closer, and gets three straight series to prove the past three weeks were a correction rather than a mirage. Fenway in August suddenly matters again, and that alone makes this the most consequential week of Boston's season so far.