The best player on the field Thursday night used to wear an Orioles uniform. Baltimore is the team that traded him away a month ago, and he did his damage in the building where he used to work, getting a standing ovation before he made them pay for it.
Adley Rutschman hit two home runs against his old team. That wasn't a coincidence, or just a nice moment for the fans to feel good about. It was a receipt. His first-inning drive gave Boston an early lead, his sixth-inning shot cut a two-run deficit to one, and for most of the game he was the only Red Sox hitter doing anything at all. He had Boston's only two hits until Eli White's double in the seventh. Take Rutschman out of this game and the Red Sox don't sniff it.
Call it what it was: one player reminding his old team exactly what it gave up, with a late-inning gut punch from someone nobody outside New England had heard of thrown in for good measure.
Rutschman's night should have been the whole story. Instead it's only half of it. Boston trailed 3-1 after Luis Robert Jr. and Pete Alonso went back-to-back in the fourth, and the Red Sox had exactly one hit through five innings. This was a laid-out, ready-to-write Baltimore win. Then Brandon Young let a two-out rally get away in the seventh to tie it, and in the eighth Nick Sogard, who entered the night with all of three home runs on the season, took Yennier Cano deep for a two-run shot that broke the tie for good. Cano had allowed one other homer all year in a mountain of appearances. Sogard picking that moment to be the second is the kind of thing that makes losing GMs want to throw their laptops.
Roman Anthony tacked on a solo shot in the ninth to make it look comfortable, and it still wasn't: Aroldis Chapman gave up a two-run homer to Christian Encarnacion-Strand before closing it out. He got the save. The Orioles made him work for every bit of it, and if you're Baltimore, that's the maddening part: the pitching that should have buried this game instead let two low-percentage moments, a rookie reliever's second blown lead in a week and a five-inning no-hit streak from Boston's bats, turn into the difference.
That rookie matters here too. Luis De León, one of Baltimore's better pitching prospects, has now taken the loss in relief in back-to-back tight, tied ballgames since getting called up. Both times the Orioles handed him the ball in a spot where the answer was no. That's on the front office and the manager's office as much as it's on a kid who's still figuring out the strike zone at this level. If Baltimore keeps throwing him into tied, late-inning fires, they're going to keep losing games like this one.
Pull back and this is one game in a September that's still being decided. Boston moved to 76-65 and held one of the American League's wild-card spots with a real cushion, though the race behind them was crowded enough that nobody in that group could relax. Baltimore dropped to 69-72, its second straight loss, and sits outside the picture, not officially buried but not knocking on the door either. None of that is settled with three-plus weeks left, and I'm not going to pretend it is.
What is settled, at least for one night, is who won the argument about giving up Adley Rutschman. Pete Alonso can keep hitting his way into the RBI conversation, and he did: his two RBI Thursday pulled him level atop the American League leaderboard entering Friday. But Rutschman was the best player in that ballpark wearing the wrong team's laundry, and Baltimore's fans stood up and cheered him for it before he made them pay. That's not the kind of moment a front office wants repeated. It usually is anyway.
