The Rays had scored twice to make it 7-4, the bases were loaded with no outs, and Jonathan Papelbon had come on. It took a rolling, tumbling, game-saving catch by Jacoby Ellsbury to keep the Rays down, a play sandwiched by a 94-mile-per-hour Papelbon fastball for a strikeout of B.J. Upton and a nine-pitch at-bat by Carl Crawford that began with Papelbon getting two immediate strikes and ended with Crawford fouling to left field.
Papelbon finished it out in the ninth, a gargantuan six-out effort from a closer who hasn’t always been lights out, unless the bases have been loaded.
“Oh boy,’’ Sox manager Terry Francona said after the win finally was completed. “I told [Ellsbury], when he came in, I said, ‘Jake, if you miss that and it rolls, just go right up that tunnel and go right out with it.’ I was obviously teasing him. But that’s a game-saver. They’ve got runners moving - that was a heck of a play.
“He either has to commit to that or not. He had a bead on it. He worked his body around it where he could make the play. Not just a great effort, but a great effort and make the play.’’
“Ellsbury doesn’t make that play, that was the game right there pretty much,’’ Rays manager Joe Maddon said. “That ball is 2 feet shorter or he’s like 2 feet late, I think we win that game.
“So it came down to one play for me, and they made it.’’
Early on, rather than the Sox appearing out of sorts and out of rhythm, it was the Rays who looked like a team ready for the season to end - at least until that eighth, when Hideki Okajima allowed them signs of life with a bunt and a walk and a couple of bloops.
On came Papelbon, though, and he somehow made it through, sending most of the 17,692 Rays fans to the exits, their cheers having died down in the wake of a win by the Sox that put them six games up on Tampa in the wild-card race (and 3 1/2 up on the Rangers).
