Elle's Baseball Musings: Two Massachusetts Kids Shut Out the Red Sox
By Elle Elena ·
Cam Schlittler grew up in Walpole in a Red Sox family, and he went to the 2004 championship parade when he was three. Ben Rice grew up in Cohasset, about 20 miles from Fenway, as a Yankees fan who wore a Yankees jersey to first-grade picture day. On Tuesday night at Yankee Stadium, the two Massachusetts kids shut out the Red Sox, 9-0, and gave New York a 1-0 lead in the best-of-three Wild Card Series.
Payton Tolle needed one pitch to get the second out of the fifth inning. Paul Goldschmidt lined a 95.9 mph sinker to Wilyer Abreu in right field, and the Red Sox, down 1-0, were one out from getting through the fifth. Tolle had thrown eight pitches in the inning and 83 on the night. Then Chad Tracy made the change.
Going in, the job I gave Tolle was to get Boston into the middle innings with the game still close. He did it in his first career postseason start. Four and two-thirds innings, one run, five hits, one walk, four strikeouts. His first pitch was a 96.5 mph fastball that Goldschmidt fouled off, and he touched 99.2 later on. The only run off him came in the second, when Austin Wells pulled a two-out grounder at 102 mph through the right side to score George Lombard Jr.
The hitter due up was left-swinger Ben Rice. Rice had a 188-point OPS split on the season and Tolle had the left-on-left advantage. Rice had already seen him twice, doubling on a 98.7 mph fastball in the first and striking out on a curveball in the third. The next trip would have been his third look. Tracy skipped it and brought in another lefty, Erik Miller.
Miller opened with a slider for a called strike and missed with a second slider. Then he threw a 96.8 mph sinker, and Rice hit it 423 feet to center field, into Monument Park. It left the bat at 108 mph. I understand the move. The third time through the order is where a lot of managers stop trusting a starter. The fresh arm still gave up a homer on his third pitch, a middle-middle fastball, and the game was 2-0.
Two runs were plenty for Schlittler. His first pitch of the night was a 100.6 mph fastball for a called strike to Roman Anthony, and I stared at that reading longer than I needed to. He finished with 6 1/3 scoreless innings, two hits, one walk and 10 strikeouts on 117 pitches, 10 more than his previous career high. He threw 65 four-seamers that averaged 98.6 and topped out at 101, plus 32 curveballs. Boston swung through the fastball 14 times and the curve eight times. The strikeouts came four on the curve, four on the fastball and two on the cutter. After Adley Rutschman's single in the first, he retired 13 in a row. No Red Sox runner reached second base against him, and the Bronx was chanting MVP before he left. Last October he ended Boston's season with eight innings and 12 strikeouts in Game 3. The kid from the parade has now thrown 14 1/3 scoreless postseason innings against the team he grew up with.
When Schlittler left with one out and Abreu on first in the seventh, Paul Blackburn got Ceddanne Rafaela to roll a sinker to Lombard, and the Yankees turned a 6-4-3 double play. Boston finished with three hits. The last was Trevor Story's two-out double off Blackburn in the eighth.
The Yankees kept adding on against the bullpen. In the seventh, Alec Gamboa faced four hitters and retired none. Spencer Jones and Wells singled, Goldschmidt worked a nine-pitch walk, and Rice lined an 0-2 fastball to right for a 3-0 lead. Luis García Jr. grounded into a double play that brought Wells home anyway.
The eighth is the inning I will remember. Wyatt Olds gave up a leadoff single to Lombard, walked Ryan McMahon, got a sacrifice bunt from Anthony Volpe and walked Jones. Brayan Bello came in, and Wells lifted a sacrifice fly to make it 5-0. Goldschmidt walked on six pitches to load the bases again with two outs. Bello went after Rice with sinkers. Called strike, foul, 0-2. A sinker missed, a changeup bounced, another sinker missed. On 3-2, Bello threw one more sinker, 97.4 mph, and Rice sent it 408 feet to center for a grand slam. Five of the six pitches in that at-bat were sinkers. The last one made it 9-0.
Rice went 4-for-5 with a double, two homers, six RBIs and 11 total bases, tying the Yankees' franchise record for RBIs in a postseason game. Five of those RBIs came with two outs. With Aaron Judge out with a right calf strain, the Yankees needed someone to do that, and it was the first-grader in the Yankees jersey. Boston's relievers covered 3 1/3 innings and were charged with eight runs.
Fenway is still my favorite big-league park. It feels like baseball grew around the building instead of the other way around. Watching the Red Sox get blanked in the Bronx does not change that. Boston climbed from 32-46 on June 24 to get here, and now it has to win two in a row on the road.
In the preview, I said Tolle's fourth and fifth innings would tell me more than his first few pitches. He was one out from finishing the fifth when Tracy came to get him. Game 1 winners took 15 of the 16 best-of-three Wild Card Series from 2022 through 2025. The one team that came back was last year's Yankees, against Boston. Game 2 is Wednesday at 7 p.m. CT at Yankee Stadium on NBC and Peacock, with Sonny Gray facing Max Fried. If Boston wins, Ranger Suarez and Gerrit Cole are lined up for Game 3 on Thursday. If Boston loses, its season ends in the Bronx for the second October in a row.
-Elle