The Red Sox beat the Rays, 4-2, on Saturday night at Tropicana Field in Game 6 of the American League Championship Series to force a deciding Game 7 on Sunday night with the winner advancing to the World Series.
By defeating the Rays for the second consecutive game, the Red Sox erased the Rays' 3-1 series advantage.
Winning three games in a row is not a strange thing to the defending World Series champions. Fifteen times during the regular season the Sox won at least three straight games. The Sox had one winning streak of seven, two streaks of five, three streaks of four, and nine streaks of three.
A sellout crowd of 40,947 watched as the Rays got off to a good start Saturday night thanks to postseason hero B.J. Upton.
Upton continued his torrid offensive spurt with a first-inning home run on a 3-2 pitch from Josh Beckett that put the Rays up, 1-0. Upton's blast hit the C-ring catwalk -- 125 feet above the field -- and gave him four home runs for the ALCS and seven for the postseason to tie Troy Glaus' American League postseason record. Upton also accrued his 11th RBI with the blast, tying him with David Ortiz (2004) for the LCS RBI record.
"We started out pretty well with B.J.'s homer, but we could not string anything together," Rays manager Joe Maddon said. "We had four hits, whatever it was, and they left 12 guys on base, and I was taking that as a good sign, but it just didn't want to come through for us.
"Overall, we pitched pretty well. We just did not get the offensive performance tonight that we had been getting."
Boston's Kevin Youkilis tied the game at 1 with a home run in the top of the second off Rays starter James Shields, and he drove in the Red Sox's second run when he grounded out to score Dustin Pedroia in the third.
Jason Bartlett hit a home run off Beckett with two outs in the fifth that hugged the foul pole in left field to tie the game at 2.
Jason Varitek answered for the Red Sox with two outs in the sixth, when he hit a 2-0 Shields pitch into the right-field stands. Coco Crisp added an infield single that deflected off Shields to Akinori Iwamura at second. J.P. Howell took over for Shields to face Pedroia, who grounded to shortstop, but Bartlett threw wild to first to allow Crisp to reach third. David Ortiz's bloop single scored Crisp to put the Red Sox up, 4-2.
Looking ahead to Sunday's Game 7, Maddon said, "It's all about how we react to the moment. It's a great learning experience. For us to win that game would be something special for us.
"So it's not about looking into the past. It's about looking into the future right now. We've got to get ready to play that game tomorrow. We've got [Matt] Garza ready to pitch and we're going to go out and play our game, and that's basically how I'm going to look at it. It has nothing to do with what happened over the last couple days."
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