This game was drunk, and Caleb Durbin finally took away the keys
Boston trailed in the ninth, 10th, 11th and 12th innings—and somehow won every damn time before Durbin ended a 13-inning Fenway asylum, 12-11.
There are baseball games.
There are crazy baseball games.
And then there’s whatever the hell happened at Fenway Park Thursday night.
The Red Sox beat the White Sox 12-11 in 13 innings, completing the sweep, extending their winning streak to eight games and improving to 63-51. That description, however, is approximately as useful as describing the Hindenburg as “a slight travel inconvenience.”
Boston trailed 7-3 in the fifth.
They came back.
Boston trailed in the ninth.
They came back.
They trailed in the 10th.
They came back.
They trailed in the 11th.
They came back.
They trailed in the 12th.
THEY CAME BACK AGAIN.
Finally, in the bottom of the 13th, Caleb Durbin mercifully ended this six-hour hostage negotiation by lining a walk-off single into center to score Nick Sogard and give Boston a completely absurd 12-11 victory.
If you went to bed early, congratulations on your healthy lifestyle.
You also missed a baseball game written by a maniac.
Ranger Suárez picked a terrible night to forget how this works
Let’s get the ugly part out of the way.
Ranger Suárez didn’t have it.
Chicago scored four times in the third, once in the fourth and twice more in the fifth to build a 7-3 lead.
At that point, this looked like the classic getaway-day clunker.
Boston had already taken the series. They’d been beating the stuffing out of Chicago. Eventually somebody was going to lose.
Fine.
Take the loss.
Pack the bags.
Move on.
Except apparently nobody told this Red Sox team that losing was an available option.
Boston scored three times in the fourth, another in the sixth and kept grinding until it had turned the game into something resembling competitive baseball again.
Then the ninth inning arrived.
And reality left the building.
The ninth inning started the insanity
Chicago took a 7-6 lead into the bottom of the ninth.
Three outs.
That’s all they needed.
Instead, Boston tied it.
Okay.
Extra innings.
Surely now we’d get some normal baseball.
Absolutely not.
Chicago scored two runs in the 10th.
9-7.
Now it’s over.
Right?
Wrong.
Boston answered with two runs in the bottom half.
9-9.
At this point White Sox manager Will Venable probably began wondering whether Fenway had secretly removed the exits.
Nobody was allowed to leave.
The 11th inning: Let’s do this stupid thing again
Chicago scored in the 11th.
10-9 White Sox.
Surely Boston couldn’t do this again.
Boston:
“Hold my Sam Adams.”
Nick Sogard came home with the tying run.
10-10.
The White Sox had now taken the lead in consecutive extra innings and failed to hold either one.
That’s not bullpen management.
That’s waterboarding your fan base.
And we weren’t done.
The 12th inning: Now it’s officially performance art
Sam Antonacci singled home Drew Romo in the top of the 12th.
11-10 Chicago.
For the fourth consecutive inning, the White Sox had a lead they could potentially protect.
And for the fourth consecutive inning, Boston basically said:
“That’s adorable.”
Jarren Duran reached third.
Jake Rogers lifted a sacrifice fly.
Duran scored.
11-11.
Again.
At this point, Chicago’s bullpen wasn’t blowing leads.
It was operating a lead recycling program.
Environmentally responsible, really.
Caleb Durbin finally said enough
Bottom 13.
Nick Sogard was the automatic runner at second.
Wilyer Abreu reached.
Then Caleb Durbin stepped in against Erick Fedde.
Durbin had already collected two hits.
He had already spent the evening watching this game refuse to die.
So he did everyone in New England a favor.
Single to center.
Sogard scores.
12-11.
Game over.
Everybody go home.
Turn off the lights.
Lock Fenway.
Never speak of this again.
Durbin finished with three hits, including the first walk-off hit of his Major League career.
Brayan Bello deserves a massive piece of this win
Here’s something that could get buried beneath all the offensive lunacy.
Brayan Bello was huge.
After Boston’s bullpen had been stretched to the breaking point, Bello handled the final two innings and kept Chicago scoreless in the 13th, finally giving the offense an opportunity to win the game rather than merely tie it for the 47th time.
That’s not glamorous.
But in a 13-inning game where relievers are disappearing faster than beers at last call, somebody has to stabilize things.
Bello did.
And Boston needed every single out.
The box score belongs in a museum
Final: Red Sox 12, White Sox 11 — 13 innings.
Chicago finished with 11 runs on 13 hits and stranded 14 runners.
Boston countered with 12 runs on 16 hits, while leaving 13 runners aboard themselves.
Combined?
29 hits.
23 runs.
27 runners left on base.
13 innings.
Two defensive errors by Boston.
One by Chicago.
And probably 40,000 people Googling “normal resting heart rate” around midnight.
This wasn’t baseball.
This was two teams throwing kitchen appliances at each other until somebody collapsed.
Eight straight wins
Somehow, amid all the madness, there’s a larger story.
Boston has now won eight consecutive games.
The Red Sox are 63-51 and continue climbing through the American League playoff picture.
But forget the standings for a moment.
Look at how they’re winning.
They won 14-2.
They won a shutout.
Now they’ve won 12-11 in 13 innings after trailing over and over and over again.
There is apparently no approved method for beating this team right now.
Blow them out?
They come back.
Take a one-run lead?
They come back.
Score twice in extras?
They come back.
Take the lead four separate times after the ninth inning?
Congratulations.
They still come back.
And that’s the part that matters
Here’s the question worth pondering:
When does confidence become inevitability?
There’s a point during a winning stretch when something changes inside a clubhouse.
Players stop hoping they’ll win.
They start assuming they’ll figure out how.
Thursday night might be the clearest example yet.
Boston wasn’t playing pristine baseball. The pitching got knocked around. The defense made mistakes. They stranded 13 runners. Chicago scored eleven freaking runs.
And none of it mattered.
Every time the White Sox scored, the Red Sox came back to the dugout acting like somebody had merely handed them another problem to solve.
That’s dangerous.
Because talent fluctuates.
Pitching fluctuates.
Hitting absolutely fluctuates.
But collective belief?
That can carry teams through games they have absolutely no business winning.
The concern, of course, is that you can’t live like this forever. October won’t politely allow you to surrender eleven runs and ask for four do-overs.
But maybe that’s missing the point.
The Red Sox aren’t proving they can win playoff games 12-11.
They’re proving something more valuable:
They don’t mentally concede games anymore.
That’s the transformation.
Earlier versions of this team found reasons to lose.
This one keeps inventing increasingly ridiculous reasons to win.
And Thursday night may have been the most ridiculous one yet.
The Red Sox swept Chicago, won their eighth straight and survived one of the most absurd games Fenway Park will see all season. Caleb Durbin gets the headline. Brayan Bello deserves his flowers. And every fan who stayed through 13 innings deserves hazard pay.
Share today’s Red Sox Digest with the poor bastard who texted you “game over” in the fifth inning. Then send it to the guy who said it again in the ninth. And the 10th. And the 11th. And the 12th.
Because apparently the 2026 Red Sox have established one very simple rule:
The game isn’t over until Caleb Durbin says you can go home.