Thursday’s Red Sox win was the perfect moment to celebrate the journeyman
Sometimes a good night can be enough.
COMMENTARY
There’s something delightfully apt about Christian Arroyo and Rob Refsnyder being at the core of Thursday’s 9-8 Red Sox victory over the Rangers, a five-run comeback just about conjured from thin air.
Arroyo, who added three more RBIs to a torrid month-plus and drew his second intentional walk in about a week, might finally play half a season in this, his sixth year in the majors. Refsnyder, who finished things with his first career walk-off hit, is in his ninth organization in the past six years.
They are journeymen having a moment, as journeymen do. (With the possible caveat that Arroyo, a one-time first rounder who’s still just 27, could become something more with health.) They are having their moments on a team that is collectively much the same. Good in stretches, but simply not up to the standard to do something everlasting.
But that does not mean the good times can’t still be enjoyable. Watching the struggles makes the reward all the more appealing. Even in a case like this team, and these guys, where we pretty clearly know the ceiling.
It wasn’t just Arroyo and Refsnyder in the late innings Thursday, of course. Rafael Devers broke an 0-for-24 slump with doubles in back-to-back innings. Xander Bogaerts was on base three times and scored on all of them. Alex Verdugo had three hits.
It was the sort of the game the 2021 Red Sox — perhaps just the version of this team whose coin flips all landed heads — seemed to win an awful lot of. A thoroughly subdued Fenway roared to life as the Sox closed in the eighth, faded as they left the bases loaded, then erased the rest of their three-run deficit in the ninth.
“Good at-bats, walks, worked the counts, used the whole field,” manager Alex Cora told reporters. “We haven’t done that in a while.”
Arroyo seems to have a knack for this stuff. A year ago, before he disappeared injured for most of the stretch run, four of his six home runs were multi-run shots in victories over playoff teams. His pinch hit grand slam in Atlanta elicited a giddy “there he goes again!” from Dennis Eckersley that I still think of every time Arroyo, well, goes again.
Few savor those moments like Arroyo, too. He was tremendous on the mic during the Little League Classic a couple weeks back, and he celebrates like a player acutely aware just how hard success is to come by.
Refsnyder knows, too. He’s finishing up a fourth straight season that began with baseball’s slightest whiff of a guarantee — a minor-league contract and an invite to spring training. With four different organizations to boot.
It is a limited sample: .310/.388/.491 in 42 games, his four home runs just about doubling his career total to 10. But for a player who’s been grinding as a pro for more than a decade now, it is a sweet payoff all the same.
“I’m not going to lie . . . I was thinking about it when I was going up,” Refsnyder said on NESN, right before Arroyo crushed him with an ice bath. “I was like, ‘Man, it’d be a good time to get my first one.’
“I was fortunate enough to come through.”
He joined a select club on Thursday. Sixty-five players have delivered a walk-off hit for the Red Sox in the regular season since 2000. (It’s not that David Ortiz tops the list with 17, it’s that he tops it with 17 when Bogaerts is second with five.)
The list of twenty-eight with multiple walkoffs doesn’t contain many surprises for long-term Sox watchers. Brian Daubach having three, I suppose. The 37 one-offs, though? Lot of Let’s Remember Some Guys energy in there.
Cody Ross, who admirably tried to make the 2012 team watchable, with a moonshot home run on July 19, 2012.
Nick Green, whose locker just about spilled gloves as he pinballed around the 2009 lineup, sneaking a ball past the Pesky Pole that June 21.
Darnell McDonald, who was 31 and had played just parts of three seasons when he found a home on the 2010 Sox, began his moment in the sun here with a walk-off wall ball.
Marco Hernandez, who fought through surgery after surgery to get back to the majors, beating out a bases-loaded grounder against the White Sox three years ago.
None of those teams won championships. None came particularly close, really, and none of those players mean very much to your average Sox fan all these years down the line.
Refsnyder won’t either. Nor probably will Arroyo, who’s made the most of his production, but that production is just about in line with Dante Bichette’s in a Red Sox uniform. (Cruel, but the numbers are the numbers.)
In a year hinging toward bad, with Tanner Houck’s status the latest blow, sometimes a good night and a happy ending can just be enough.’
To comment, please create a screen name in your profile
To comment, please verify your email address
Conversation
This discussion has ended. Please join elsewhere on Boston.com