Thursday was a team stopping its freefall right before it became a real problem, not a team suddenly finding itself again.
Boston had lost five straight, matching its worst skid of the season, and had already dropped the first three games of this series in Toronto. A sweep was sitting right there. Instead, Payton Tolle took the ball and made sure it never got that far.
Eight innings, two hits, four strikeouts, only 91 pitches, and he retired his final 17 batters in a row, matching the longest outing of his career. That's not a rookie surviving a cooling-off lineup. That's a pitcher who took the game and closed it out without ever letting up. What matters more than the final score is that Boston has a starter who can deliver that kind of game exactly when the team needs it.
Caleb Durbin supplied the knockout blow, turning a one-run game into a laugher with an eighth-inning grand slam off Chase Lee, then added an RBI single in the ninth to cap a 3-for-5 night. That slam is the moment everyone will remember, and fairly so. But Tolle's outing matters more going forward. Slams are moments. What Boston needed was a pitcher who could go deep into a game and spare a shaky bullpen, one start that reminded everyone the rotation isn't the problem.
Max Scherzer took the loss, continuing what's been a rough season for him. Toronto had won three straight before Thursday and had played with more urgency all series. That trend flips back the other way after this one game, but a single shutout doesn't erase it. The Blue Jays were the better team for three games. Boston was better for one, and it happened to be the one with a grand slam and a dominant start attached to it.
This result matters more for what it prevented than what it proved. A sweep in Toronto, on top of everything before it, would have made this a real crisis. Instead, the Red Sox stay in solid position for a wild-card spot and leave Rogers Centre with the loss column no worse than it was. That's meaningful. It's not the same as saying the team has turned a corner.
So enjoy the Durbin slam, and appreciate what Tolle did. Pitching like that is rare and worth building a staff around. But don't let one final score talk you out of what the previous five games showed: this team can lose in bunches, and it took a career-level start just to keep that streak from hitting six.
