As Sonny Gray took the mound with his no-hitter heading into the eighth inning, it seemed like a valuable exercise to look up what other signature moments took place on June 28 throughout Red Sox history.
There was Mookie Betts being called up to the big leagues in 2014.
Ted Williams beat Willie Mays in an exhibition Home Run Derby.
Dwight Evans capped off hitting for the cycle with a walk-off, three-run home run.
Last year, the Red Sox's 15-1 win over the Blue Jays snapped a six-game losing streak and propelled the team to 23 wins in their next 30 games.
And, now, there is another one. It's Sunday night's 5-4, extra-inning win over the Yankees at Fenway Park.
It remains to be seen if this walk-off win, which was punctuated by Jarren Duran's RBI single in the 10th inning, will have the same impact that the rout of Toronto did a year ago. But, for now, it has certainly separated itself. For starters, the victory allowed for the Sox's first four-game win streak of the season and their initial series sweep at Fenway Park.
And it all took place against the first-place Yankees.
"That was a special four days, and they were into it," said Red Sox interim manager Chad Tracy. "That was loud."
There were other elements that helped define the day.
Gray didn't get his no-hitter, with Amed Rosario managing a one-out single in the eighth. But it was still an outing that won't be forgotten any time soon, with the righty managing his sixth straight quality outing. It extended the Sox's streak of consecutive quality starts to 11 games, their longest streak since a franchise-record 14 games in 1988.
And added to the 7 1/3-inning, one-hit outing by Gray was the milestone of becoming the seventh active pitcher to reach 2,000 strikeouts.
"I knew after like four innings," said Gray, who now owns a minuscule 2.64 ERA, with the Red Sox having gone 11-4 in his starts. "I was like, ‘Oh, I haven’t given up a hit.’ And then after five. But I never [got preoccupied] by it. I solely was just so focused on executing every pitch that I threw. I know it sounds super cliché and whatever, but I was solely just like, ‘Execute this pitch, now execute this pitch, now execute this pitch’ throughout the whole time."
Aroldis Chapman, who allowed the Yankees to send it to extra innings by giving up two runs in the ninth inning, also accomplished his own bit of history by tying Hoyt Wilhelm for the most strikeouts by a relief pitcher in big league history.
And there was, of course, that image of only the second walk-off for the Red Sox this season, with Duran's celebratory, one-out single, pushing Masa Yoshida's game-ending high-hopper from early this season to the recesses of the season's highlight reel.
"It meant a lot," said Duran, who initially wasn't in the starting lineup. “I feel like I’ve let this team down a lot this year, and that moment just kind of felt like I let a little bit off my shoulders. So it was a pretty good feeling."
But, more than anything, the night offered the kind of hope and optimism that the ballpark has been devoid of for most of the season.
They still sit 4 1/2 games out of a wild-card spot, and 10 games under .500, but the four-game sweep allowed the Red Sox to dream for a while longer. They do, after all, have the same number of losses as the Orioles, just one more than the Blue Jays and Twins, with the A's and Astros living just two games up in the loss column.
There is still seemingly a race to decipher exactly what the Red Sox might be doing with such players as Gray and Chapman when the Aug. 3 trade deadline rolls around. The next four series might go a long way to figuring all that out, with the Sox taking on two teams that are built to hit more than pitch (Nationals, White Sox), and two others that are experiencing far more dire situations than Craig Breslow's bunch (Angels, Mets).
What this did was push the Red Sox down a more palatable path during what sure seems like a late June fork-in-the-road.
“There’s a long way to go," Tracy said. “We have some momentum now, maybe the best momentum we’ve had.”
