Blowing a lead against the defending back-to-back champions and still winning by five tells you something about a team's temperament, not just its talent. Boston's 9-4 win over the Dodgers on Aug. 1 wasn't clean. The Red Sox led 3-0, watched Los Angeles claw back with a run in the fourth, then take a 4-3 lead in the fifth on a two-run blast from Shohei Ohtani. Instead of folding the way plenty of teams do against that much star power, they answered with a five-run seventh that buried the Dodgers for good. Ceddanne Rafaela's go-ahead two-run homer turned the inning, Andruw Monasterio added a two-run double to pile on, and Brayan Bello came out of the bullpen to throw four scoreless innings and pick up his first win since May 5.
That seventh inning matters more than the final score. Plenty of teams score nine runs against a mediocre pitching staff. Fewer come back against a Dodgers club that entered the night 69-41 and sitting atop the NL West, playing out a regular season it's already all but locked into the postseason. The Globe's framing of the stakes is right: for Los Angeles, this game barely registers against the backdrop of staying healthy for October. For Boston, at 58-51 and scrapping for playoff position, every one of these nights is oxygen. A desperate team and a comfortable one played the same nine innings, and the desperate team looked like the better ballclub for most of it.
Zoom out and this win is really a bow on an absurd month. Boston finished July with a 21-4 record, a .840 winning percentage that's the best in a calendar month in franchise history among months with at least 15 games, edging out stretches from 1950 and 1901. That's more than a hot week; it's a sustained run against big-league pitching, and it changes how a fan base thinks about a season. Interim manager Chad Tracy put it plainly: "Obviously the month of July was incredible and necessary with where we were at. It was necessary that we played better and got on a run and we got on a heck of a run. We have to continue that now because we're playing very good baseball." He's right. A hot month doesn't guarantee anything in August, but it tells you this roster has a ceiling nobody outside of Boston was pricing in this spring.
The one thing I won't spin into a positive is the Contreras situation. He was hit in the helmet by a 95.4-mph pitch in the third inning and left the game. Initial concussion tests came back fine, with more testing planned for Saturday. That's wait-and-see, not a green light, and a team riding this kind of momentum can't afford to lose its catcher for any real stretch heading into August.
Ohtani was clearly not at full strength. He'd sat out the previous game with soreness in his left knee, the same injury that's kept him out of the rotation since the break, and he still hit a two-run homer that gave the Dodgers the lead. That's what this Dodgers roster can do even while managing injuries and coasting toward October. Boston found a way past it anyway. If the Red Sox keep playing with this kind of resolve, this win won't look like an upset over a great team so much as a preview of how they plan to fight through August into October.
