The Boston Red Sox traveled back into enemy territory on Thursday to prepare for Game 6 (and hopefully 7) of the American League Championship Series.
They now trail the Houston Astros 3-2 in the series, facing elimination in Game 6 on Friday after a two-game slump offensively.
"Which better team than us to be prepared for this?" Xander Bogaerts on Thursday rhetorically asked reporters in his media availability, via ASAP Sports.
Valid.
Boston has had its back against the walls since falling out of favor in the AL East to the Tampa Bay Rays. Just to make the postseason, it had to play weeks of what essentially became do-or-die baseball against division opponents, overcome injuries and deal with a considerable COVID-19 outbreak.
All that just to make the Wild Card Game against their archrival New York Yankees.
"I think the experience of 162 and the experience of the Wild Card Game is going to help us tomorrow," manager Alex Cora said via ASAP Sports. "Actually, like I said, they were very uncomfortable. In this case it's not uncomfortable. You just go in, and if you have to use the whole staff, you use it to get to the next day, and then whatever happens in Game 7, we'll figure out. Maybe the roof has a leak, and it rains, and then we can reset our pitching staff for another day."
All season, the Red Sox have found ways to survive and advance. To this point, all the people they had to prove wrong helped fueled the journey. Now, having far exceeded expectations, the only points left to prove are to themselves.
"The way I see it, we don't have to prove people wrong," Cora said. We just have to prove ourselves that, yeah, we belong here, and we've done it the whole season. We talk about it. We have a good baseball team, and when we play good baseball, we win baseball games. We'll be ready for tomorrow. We've been there. We've gone there, and we won three in a row at one point in the playoffs not too long ago and we faced some great pitchers, right? We celebrated there. So, like I said, our goal is to go tomorrow and put a whole baseball game, win and move on to the next one, and we do the same thing, and we'll be in the World Series if we do that."
Sounds simple enough, right?
