Why baseball fans everywhere should be rooting for the streaking Red Sox

BOSTON — The sound off the bat said it all: Tyler O’Neil’s line drive to left was going to lift the Baltimore Orioles to a ninth-inning tie with the Boston Red Sox in this tense, back-and-forth Battle of the Winning Streaks Monday night at Fenway Park.

But then the sound off the bat was snuffed out by the roar of the masses as Red Sox shortstop Tsung-Che Cheng, all 5-foot-8 of him, leaped into the air to turn O’Neil’s would-be single into a game-ending out. Red Sox 6, Orioles 5.

Baltimore’s winning streak ended at seven games. Boston’s winning streak was extended to 14. And that means from the moment you’re reading this until first pitch Tuesday night, a whole lot of hardball historians are going to be sorting through dusty scrapbooks for intel on the hard-charging 1946 Red Sox and the club record 15-game winning streak they amassed from April 25 to May 10. 

These Red Sox are not those Red Sox, even if the ’26 version ties the record with a 15th straight victory Tuesday night, with the Orioles again providing the opposition. C’mon. The ’46 Red Sox featured Ted Williams, who had completed his service to his country in World War II to assume his place as the greatest hitter that ever lived.  They had another future Hall of Famer in slugging second baseman Bobby Doerr, returning from a year in the Army. They had shortstop Johnny Pesky, also back from the war. Picking right up where he left off before putting his Red Sox uni aside for three years in Navy blue, Pesky would register his third straight season with 200-plus hits. Dominic DiMaggio, Joltin’ Joe’s kid brother, was a nifty center fielder who hit .316 that year.  He, too, was returning after three years in the Navy. 

But while reading up on the 1946 Red Sox late Monday night, I was stunned, and amused, when I came across a column by the esteemed Harold Kaese of the Boston Globe. Seems Kaese had done some canvassing of players and managers beyond Boston and came up with this conclusion: It would be good for baseball if the Red Sox won the pennant.

See, “1918” was just as big a deal in those days as it was when Carl Yastrzemski, Jim Rice and Wade Boggs were playing for the Red Sox.

“Every club has visited Fenway Park, and sentiment among rival players usually has been, ‘If we can’t win the pennant, I hope the Red Sox can,’” Kaese wrote for the May 9 Globe, this after the Sox out-thumped the Chicago White Sox 14-10 to extend their winning streak to 13 games.

Kaese went on as follows: “A Red Sox victory will be nationally popular because of admiration for (owner) Tom Yawkey, sympathy for (manager) Joe Cronin and what amounts to veneration for Ted Williams. Also, everyone knows that Boston, one of baseball’s strongholds, has not flown a pennant since 1918.”

Kaese spoke with White Sox manager Jimmy Dykes, who acknowledged, “It would be a good thing for baseball if the Red Sox could win. … if we can’t win the pennant, I hope the Red Sox can.”

I know what you’re thinking: The 21st-century Red Sox have celebrated World Series championships in 2004, 2007, 2013 and 2018. As such, fans in other MLB ports of call aren’t going to be rooting for the Red Sox to win yet another Fall Classic. Many fans outside New England despise the Red Sox and their haughty, “Sweet Caroline”-singing fans. Toss in the six Super Bowl championships by the Tom Brady/Bill Belichick Patriots, a couple of NBA titles by the Celtics and a 2011 Stanley Cup by the Bruins, and that’s 13 rolling rallies this century. Because of that, everyone else hates Boston.

But here’s another way of looking at it: While nobody’s asking you to suddenly develop a crush on the 2026 Red Sox, fans everywhere should be bringing Boston’s baseball revival concert to the attention of the folks who run baseball ops for their team.

What the Red Sox are doing is delivering hope. In an age of ever-expanding playoffs, summertime turns into a non-stop debate for fans of a dozen or more teams: Buyers or sellers? Especially this season, what with most of the American League being reduced to Unfortunate .500 outfits. With so many teams either right around the mid-level mark or struggling to get there, they find themselves within shouting distance of a wild card spot in terms of the loss column, and yet a million miles from October considering how many teams they need to climb over to get there.

Which brings us back to the Red Sox. At the close of business on July 1, which is the last time the Sox lost a game, they were 37-48 and in last place in the AL East, 14 games behind the Tampa Bay Rays. For wild card purposes, they had the third-worst record in the American League, with only the Los Angeles Angels (36-51) and Kansas City Royals (35-52) below them.

Not only were many Red Sox fans expecting the Sox to move into sell-sell-sell mode, but they were also wondering if Craig Breslow, the team’s embattled chief baseball officer, was up to the task.

And yet, according to many baseball insiders, the buzz was that the Red Sox weren’t much interested in taking away from their team. Now let’s not be naive: Surely Breslow had a Plan B ready to put into place if, instead of winning 14 straight games, the Sox went, oh, let’s say 5-9. And anyway, no self-respecting Red Sox fan wants management to get comfortable assembling teams that go into each season built to win 80-something games, which is the wild card way. 

But that’s a discussion for this winter. This is summer, and the Red Sox are on the cusp of winning 15 straight, something that hasn’t happened in 80 years.

It’s worth noting that the 1946 Red Sox lost the World Series to the St. Louis Cardinals in seven games. As for the quotable Dykes, he was fired as manager of the White Sox a week-and-a-half after gushing over the Red Sox to Kaese. The ChiSox were 10-20 at the time.

But Dykes was on to something, even if it might have better served his interests had he offered up such rosy opinions about his own club.

Andy Dufresne, the wrongfully-convicted killer who wrote his own pardon by crawling through a sewer pipe to get out of Shawshank State Prison, put it best: “Hope is a good thing.” That’s what the 2026 Red Sox have delivered, and it’s turned what had been shaping up as a drab American League season into a compelling watch.