The Boston Red Sox completed a perfect nine-game road trip on Sunday, beating the New York Mets 3-2 at Citi Field behind rookie left-hander Payton Tolle. The win pushed Boston’s road winning streak to nine games, a mark the franchise had not reached since 1977, and lifted the club to 46-48 on the season, leaving Boston a half-game out of a Wild Card berth, a position that seemed unthinkable just 18 days ago when they had the worst record in the American League and sat six games behind the third Wild Card position.
But the nine-game winning streak was historic for more than just those reasons.
The turnaround traces back to April 25, when the Red Sox fired manager Alex Cora and five coaches following a disappointing 10-17 start. Chad Tracy, promoted from Triple-A Worcester, has since guided Boston through a stretch that included this 9-0 run, winning 14 of 16 overall, sweeping the Los Angeles Angels and Chicago White Sox before finishing off the Mets on the just-completed road trip.
Payton Tolle Closes Out Perfect Trip
Tolle, a rookie who entered Sunday at 5-6 with a 3.14 ERA, took the ball for the finale coming off an 8-1 win over the White Sox his previous time out. He delivered again, helping Boston continue to hold off a Mets lineup that had scored only two runs across the series’ first two games and had gone 0-for-8 with runners in scoring position on Saturday alone.
Saturday’s win set the stage. Fill-in starter Eduardo Rivera, summoned from Worcester that same morning, threw 3 2/3 scoreless innings in just his second big league appearance. Andruw Monasterio and Masataka Yoshida each hit two-run homers, and Boston blanked New York 4-0 behind a five-man bullpen effort.
“It feels good, obviously,” Tracy said of the turnaround, according to MLB.com‘s Ian Browne. “We’re doing a lot of things right. We’re throwing the ball great. We’re getting clutch hits, we’re scoring runs early. So we just got to keep playing good baseball.”
Boston Red Sox Join Rare 1977 Company
The last Red Sox team to reel off nine straight road victories came 49 years ago and featured a lineup built around Jim Rice, Carl Yastrzemski and Carlton Fisk. All three are now in baseball’s Hall of Fame.
That 1977 club produced its streak on a West Coast swing from July 29 through Aug. 7, sweeping three games at Anaheim, two at Seattle and four at Oakland.
Many Boston fans will see a different parallel. The 1988 Red Sox sat at 43-42, nine games back in the American League East, when they fired manager John McNamara on July 14 and handed the job to third-base coach Joe Morgan, according to the Society for American Baseball Research.
Echoes of “Morgan Magic” From 1988
Boston won its first 12 games under Morgan, then 18 of 19, riding a 24-game home winning streak that still stands as a major-league record. Roger Clemens, the ace of that staff, later said the managerial change “lit a fire under all of us.”
“Morgan Magic” carried Boston from nine games back to an AL East title, won by a single game over Detroit, before Oakland swept the Red Sox in the ALCS.
The 2026 version started from a deeper hole, 10-17 rather than a mediocre 43-42, and built its case on the road rather than at Fenway Park. But the shape of the story, a struggling club catching fire under a new voice promoted from within the organization, is one Red Sox fans have seen before. Whether this stretch matches Morgan’s for staying power will play out over the second half. For a team that sat 14 games under .500 in late June, Sunday’s finish was proof enough that Boston at least has a pulse heading into the All-Star break.
Red Sox Make History After Stunning 9th-Inning Comeback vs. Mets