The Red Sox playoff celebration will have to wait at least another night after the club was stymied by the Blue Jays in Thursday night’s series finale.
The playoff celebration will have to wait at least one more night.
The Red Sox bats were stymied in Thursday’s 6-1 loss to the Toronto Blue Jays, whose pitching staff combined to carry a perfect game into the seventh inning. The Blue Jays also got two home runs as part of a six-run bottom of the sixth, with Daulton Varsho’s grand slam and George Springer’s ensuing two-run homer providing all the offense Toronto needed to avoid the series sweep.
“That’s one of the best teams in the big leagues and we did an outstanding job the whole week except one inning,” Red Sox manager Alex Cora said. “You tip your hat to them, it was a great road trip and now we know what we need to do at home.”
Combined with the Houston Astros’ 11-5 win over the Athletics, Boston’s magic number remains one with three games to play.
Coming off a rocky couple of outings, the Red Sox needed Brayan Bello to bring his ‘A’ game. Though the right-hander’s command wasn’t dialed in, he was able to keep his team in the game, at least for a while.
Much like in Tuesday’s series opener the Blue Jays had several opportunities to take control early, but Bello dug deep and kept Toronto off the board.
In the first inning he allowed a one-out triple to Nathan Lukes, only to draw back to back groundouts to keep things scoreless.
In the third the Blue Jays loaded the bases on two walks and a single, and Anthony Santander pulled what would have been a grand slam just a couple of feet foul.
