CHICAGO -- John Blake, the Red Sox media relations director, looked up from his laptop computer at the end of the fifth inning, right after Julian Tavarez had struck out the side for the first time this season, and casually announced to those within earshot, "Yankees lose."
As if the Red Sox needed anything else to go their way on a day they completed a historic four-game sweep of the White Sox, 11-1, to take a 7 1/2-game lead over the Bombers with five weeks and 31 games to play.
Even before the Sox won -- scoring double-digit runs in four straight games for the first time since 1950 -- and the Yankees lost in Detroit yesterday, Clay Davenport of Baseball Prospectus, simulating the rest of the season a million times, had the Red Sox making it to the playoffs 99.6 percent of the time, with their chances of winning the division at 95.8 percent. Those numbers only got better on the eve of what had once loomed as a showdown series starting tomorrow night in the Bronx, with the Yankees still having to play the Tigers again tonight.
Feel good to have that kind of lead -- not to mention those odds -- heading into Yankee Stadium?
"It feels better playing the way we're playing," said Mike Lowell, who had 10 hits in the series and knocked in seven runs. "We're playing really well. We're getting great pitching performances, we're swinging the bats really well, and playing good defense. That combination, with our talent, is tough to beat . . . If we play this way in New York, we'll be fine."
The Sox, to a man, shied away from talking about the possibility of putting away the Yankees this week.
"Got to keep playing," said David Ortiz, whose two-run homer after Dustin Pedroia's two-run single off Javier Vazquez in the fifth broke open a 1-1 game. "We've got a month still, right? Anything can happen."
Maybe it is too early to be talking about a magic number -- at the moment it's 25, meaning any combination of Sox wins and Yankee losses totaling 25, and Boston is a division winner for the first time since 1995. But consider the improbable ways in which the Red Sox rolled over Chicago yesterday, while becoming just the fourth team since 1900 to score 10 or more runs four straight times in a series, according to the Elias Sports Bureau.
J.D. Drew homered for the first time in more than two months (51 games and 166 at-bats). Newcomer Bobby Kielty, filling in for sore-backed Manny Ramírez, started a rally with a bunt, then homered for the first time in almost a year. Ortiz hit his third first-pitch home run in three days. And Tavarez made the Sox look brilliant for giving him the start originally scheduled to go to Jon Lester.
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