Boston Red Sox win 8th straight, 26-3 in last 29 games after wild 13-inning comeback

The Boston Red Sox came back from behind five separate times and beat the Chicago White Sox 12-11 in 13 innings, per Bob Nightengale on X, extending their winning streak to eight games and moving 12 games over .500.

Red Sox manager Chad Tracy, quoted by Nightengale, offered a two-sentence summary that covered the situation about as well as anything could: "They just did not want to lose. It was incredible."

What happened

Per Nightengale, Boston trailed and rallied, trailed and rallied, and then did it again — five times in total — before finally closing out Chicago in the 13th inning. The final score was 12-11. The game was, by any reasonable accounting, a lot.

The win extended Boston's streak to eight consecutive victories and pushed their record over the last 29 games to 26-3, a stretch that has functionally rewritten the team's season narrative in real time.

Why it matters

A 26-3 run over any 29-game sample is the kind of thing that makes you double-check the arithmetic. It is not a hot week. It is not a good month. It is a sustained, compounding argument that this team is operating at a different level than it was before the stretch began.

The five-comeback structure of this particular game adds a layer worth noting. Comebacks happen. Teams rally once, maybe twice, and the box score reflects a tidy narrative arc. Five times in a single game suggests something more stubborn — a refusal, as Tracy put it, to simply lose. Whether that reflects roster construction, managerial decisions, opponent circumstances, or some combination of all three is not something Nightengale's report settles. What it does settle is the outcome: Boston won, and they did it the hard way, repeatedly.

The 13-inning length also carries operational weight. Extra-inning baseball in August is a bullpen tax, and a game that extends to the 13th — particularly one as volatile as this — asks a great deal of a pitching staff. How Boston manages that cost heading into a home series against the Athletics is one of the more practical questions the next few days will answer.

The numbers

Boston's record now sits at 87-75 (.537), placing them 3rd in the AL East, 11 games back in the division — a gap that has already rendered the division race closed for Boston. The Wild Card picture is a different matter: Boston ranks 2nd in the Wild Card standings, sitting +3.0 relative to the cut line.

The 26-3 mark over the last 29 games, per Nightengale, is the engine behind all of it. The 12-games-over-.500 figure represents where that run has deposited them. The arithmetic of the last month has been doing serious work.

Where the club stands

At 87-75, Boston is positioned 2nd in the Wild Card race with a +3.0 cushion over the cut line. The division is out of reach — 11 games back, with the club eliminated from that race — but the Wild Card margin gives Boston meaningful runway heading into the final weeks of the regular season.

The upcoming schedule brings the Athletics to Fenway Park for three games. Friday features Payton Tolle against Jack Perkins, Saturday lines up Jake Bennett against Gage Jump, and Sunday closes the series with Erik Miller against J.T. Ginn. A home series, a rested crowd, and a pitching staff that just worked 13 innings: the Athletics arrive at an interesting moment.

Worth flagging: the verified standings carry a streak of L1, which sits in some tension with the eight-game winning streak Nightengale reports from the game itself. The 8-game figure is the live number from the game; the standings figure is what it is, and the desk is not in the business of reconciling the two beyond noting the discrepancy.

Is this the best stretch in baseball right now?

That question is above the desk's pay grade to answer with precision — Nightengale's report does not include a league-wide comparison. What the report does say is that 26-3 over 29 games is the kind of record that tends to answer the question on its own, eventually.

What we don't know yet

Nightengale's report does not detail individual contributors to the comeback, which means the specific players who drove the five rallies are not something this desk can name. The game's box score — who pitched in the 13th, who drove in the tying or go-ahead runs, how the bullpen was deployed across those extra frames — is not in the material.

Tracy's quote is vivid and attributable, but it is a reaction, not an explanation. The underlying reasons for Boston's 26-3 run — whether it reflects a roster move, a rotation settling in, a lineup finding a groove, or something else entirely — are not addressed in Nightengale's report. The desk does not speculate.

The Wild Card margin of +3.0 is meaningful but not permanent. How many games remain, and the distance between Boston and the teams immediately behind them in the Wild Card race, is not something this article can quantify beyond what the verified standings provide.

What to watch

The Athletics series at Fenway starting Friday is the immediate next chapter. Boston's bullpen usage after a 13-inning game will be worth monitoring, though the desk is not in the business of predicting how that plays out. The Wild Card +3.0 cushion gives the club room, but standings are a snapshot, not a forecast.

Tracy's framing — "they just did not want to lose" — is the kind of thing that gets tested by the next game, and the one after that. The Athletics arrive Friday. Payton Tolle gets the ball.

Twenty-six wins in 29 games has a way of making the next game feel like the only one that matters. That is, in a sense, the whole point.