The trade deadline from a player's perspective
What a month it was.
On June 1, the Red Sox were three games under .500 and 8 1/2 games in back of the first-place Yankees. On July 1, they are two games under .500 with their division deficit sitting at seven games.
Seems like it would have been a fairly innocuous 30 days, right? Unless you have been sleeping under a football-shaped rock, you know better. It has been a wild ride that seemingly landed this team with a facelift, which we haven't quite taken the bandages off of.
Monday night at Fenway Park, we may have finally gotten a glimpse at this surgically-repaired roster.
Make no mistake about it, one 13-6 win over the Reds hardly automatically makes this team a thing of beauty. But it did, for the first time since the middle of last month, offer hope we wouldn't be landing at the end of this next month on Major League Baseball's version of "Botched."
The new top-of-the-order go-to guy, Roman Anthony, is now looking the part, having notched multiple hits in each of his last three games. Trevor Story punctuated his month-to-month turnaround with a home run, finishing June with a .827 OPS after totaling a .432 clip in May. And then there was Wilyer Abreu.
The outfielder who was absent for the Red Sox's mid-June stretch of winning seven of nine due to an oblique injury made sure he wasn't forgotten in being a potential piece of the team's elusive solution. Abreu became the first player to notch both an inside-the-park home run and a grand slam in the same game since Roger Maris did it on Aug. 3, 1958.
The inside-the-parker was the first by a Red Sox player since Eduardo Nunez managed the feat in 2018. And the last Sox player to do it at Fenway Park was Jacoby Ellsbury in 2011.
The seven runs in the first inning off Reds rookie pitcher Chase Burns, in which Abreu was the only Red Sox hitter the initial time through the lineup to make an out, were nice. But that race around the bases in the fifth was truly the infusion of enthusiasm this fan base has been starved for since Rafael Devers walked off the plane 15 days before.
There were other elements of the win that suggested the Red Sox were going to start this new month with some semblance of hope. Jarren Duran hit his first home run since June 11. They were able to actually win even with ace Garrett Crochet allowing a season-high five runs. And the offense not only landed with 15 hits, but also struck out just five times, something they had accomplished just twice all season.
And to top it off, there was finally an introduction to one of the players secured in the Devers deal, reliever Jordan Hicks.
Hicks offered the appearance of the dominant late-inning reliever the Red Sox have been starved for since Justin Slaten's injury, striking out two of the three batters he faced while throwing eight of his 10 pitches at 99 mph or better.
All of it added up to at least a little hope and enthusiasm. Now the bandages will start truly flying off. The big reveal - for better or worse - is almost upon us.