“And I love that dirty water … Boston you’re my ho—” oh, whoops, didn’t see you there. I was, uh, yeah I was celebrating the turnaround of the 2026 Boston Red Sox, I didn’t think I’d have to work today jeez. (takes off hat and Roman Anthony jersey) Oh, you want to know about the streak? Okay, let me get my glasses and then we can talk.

(ahem) The Boston Red Sox are on an absolute tear. They’ve gone 20-3 since June 25, won 15 straight games to tie their franchise record streak from the 1940s (!) and have turned around basically every aspect of their 2026 disasterclass to wrest control of the third American League Wild Card spot from the jaws of a confusing game of Musical Chairs/Duck Duck Goose. How on earth did we get here, and what does it all mean?

Since they began their fire-breathing rampage through everything in their path, the Red Sox have essentially doubled the offensive output of four players without seeing a major drop-off from anyone they were counting on for runs. Jay Jaffe at FanGraphs explains it all really well here, and has a nice table that shows how four guys — Willson Contreras, Andruw Monasterio, Masataka Yoshida and Caleb Durbin — have seen dramatic spikes in their wRC+ and associated power metrics since June 25.

That list doesn’t even really account for the impact of Wilyer Abreu and Ceddanne Rafaela, who have been less consistent but defensively elite with some huge hits in big spots for both. Probably the most dramatic moment of the streak (tied with Caleb Durbin’s home run) was Abreu’s impossible go-ahead two-run shot against the Tampa Bay Rays after Boston had fallen down three. Baseball is funny like that; consistency wins divisions, but at the end of the day, when you need a home run right now… someone needs to hit one right now.

In short, this team was “clutch,” a dark word in baseball given that clutch sorta doesn’t exist for teams. Well, it does, and we have clutch stats to back it up: in the last 30 days, the Boston Red Sox are by far the most clutch team (which just calculates how much win probability you add in high-leverage spots) with 4.27 Clutch (wow that sounds weird to say). That is an insane number, and more than doubles Detroit at number two.

But for the whole season, Boston has been the opposite of clutch; distinctively, un-clutch, one could say, at -1.31, which 24th in the Majors for the full season which includes this streak. And there’s no evidence that certain teams are “clutch” month over month, year over year or that clutch performances can be used as predictive for future clutch play. Jeff Sullivan wrote a great breakdown of this data in 2018, and I’ll quote from his piece here to illustrate the point:

“There’s no historical reason to believe [clutch is] a trait. It’s all just a collection of things that have happened. Things at important times that have wound up deciding ballgames.”

That is, in essence, what Boston’s 15-game win streak was about. “Things at important times” decided a number of close ballgames in a row for one team. And while it should not be used to say anything about the 2026 Boston Red Sox being a clutch team (they literally aren’t, see above), the fact that they were clutch for 30 days was the difference between the 2026 season sitting at the bottom of the Boston Harbor to rot for eternity with that tea from 1773 and becoming a buyer at the trade deadline. They brought a crane and fished the season out.

For the 2026 Red Sox, clutch does exist; maybe not as a trait, but as an event that happened and is perhaps still happening that had a seismic impact on their destiny, relationship with the city and with each other. “Things at important times” may not be something we can predict, but it still feels pretty darn awesome when they happen. Boston needed exactly that type of run (or at least something close to it) to save a season in which absolutely nothing has gone right. And they did it!

Could we have predicted it? Nope! At least not to that extent — I’ve written a lot about these Red Sox, and while they were basically always better than their putrid 32-46 record, the production they’re getting out of Durbin, Yoshida and Monasterio was not the recipe for success I had in the recipe book.

If we’re being cold and calculated, Boston will need more talent in this lineup if they’re going to oh I don’t know win the World Series or something ridiculous. Roman Anthony will need to return from the longest and most impossibly torturous Red Sox injury saga since peak Chris Sale, and Garrett Crochet will need to be back for the postseason.

Do the Red Sox believe that can happen? If they do, then buyers will be buying.