​JACKIE BRADLEY JR., take a bow!! With tonight's ​Red Sox-Orioles affair locked at 1-1 in the 11th inning, Trey Mancini surely thought he had won it for the hometown boys when he sent this one deep to left-center field. What he did not count on, however, was the reigning ALCS MVP taking flight and showcasing an absolutely unreal grab high-high above the wall to save the game for Boston. Wow. The Notorious JBJ strikes again! It's hard to get higher than that. No human being is supposed to be able to make that play. But somehow, some way, one of ​baseball's best glove guys defied the laws of Newtonian physics and gave us all a scintillating web gem of the highest order.<doc-sep>BALTIMORE -- Jackie Bradley Jr. saved Wednesday’s game for the Red Sox with an all-time catch. Bradley Jr. robbed Trey Mancini of a walk-off homer in the 11th inning, jumping and reaching over the wall in left-center to preserve a 1-1 tie. Mancini drove a Ryan Brasier fastball 401 feet with an exit velocity of 101.5 mph for the loud out. Mookie Betts homered in the third inning before Mancini tied things up with an RBI single in the sixth. Chris Sale went eight innings, allowing one run on three hits while striking out 14 batters. Andrew Benintendi gave the Sox a 2-1 lead with a solo homer in the top of the 12th. Heath Hembree closed out the win by striking out the side in the bottom of the inning and helped Boston get back to .500 with a 19-19 record.<doc-sep>The defending champion Red Sox entered Wednesday with the chance to head into an off day and then back to Fenway Park at .500 for the first time since they were 1-1. Facing the Orioles, it didn't feel like it would be a tall order, but it was. They needed 12 innings to dispatch the Orioles. In fact, they very easily could have lost the game in the bottom of the 11th on a walk-off, Trey Mancini home run. It's just that, you see, the Red Sox have this center fielder named Jackie Bradley Jr. The range, the timing on the leap, with the precision of the catch at that speed during that jump, how easy he made it look ... it's an all-around thing of beauty. Perhaps the biggest compliment I can give Bradley here is that I wasn't even surprised he caught it. In watching the play live, once I saw the way he was running, I got that "he's got a beat on it" feeling where I'd have been surprised if he didn't catch it. He's that good a defender. The Red Sox would get an Andrew Benintendi home run in the top of the 12th and hold on for a 2-1 win. There have already been plenty of low points. They returned home after a 3-8 road trip to a ring ceremony and then a loss to the Blue Jays. There was an 8-1 drubbing at the hands of the Orioles on Patriots' Day followed by a two-game sweep in Yankee Stadium. Chris Sale's rough start. The offense slumping. Some notable records along the way: 1-5 2-8 6-13 11-17 And with the win on Wednesday, the Red Sox are now 19-19 with a day off Thursday. They'll begin a an eight-game homestand against the reeling Mariners on Friday. Are the problems in the past for the Red Sox? Maybe the JBJ catch was symbolic, exorcising the early demons.<doc-sep>
Wednesday’s Red Sox-Orioles game was much more eventful than you might expect from a game featuring a Red Sox team climbing back from a rotten start and, well, the Orioles, who are trash. Chris Sale took a no-hitter into the sixth inning; later, after losing the no-no, Sale took out his frustration by dusting the Orioles for an immaculate seventh inning. But by that point the damage was done, and the Orioles had tied the Red Sox at a run a piece. That score held up through nine innings, and into extra innings. Five-plus innings of no-hit pitching plus an immaculate inning is a lot to cast away in a loss to the goddamn Orioles, but that’s what the Red Sox were staring down in the bottom of the 11th inning, when Baltimore’s Trey Mancini lifted a Ryan Brasier 0–2 fastball deep to left center—a walk-off loss to the worst team in the American League. But balls hit to center against the Red Sox have to make it past Jackie Bradley Jr., and that is a lot to ask of any inanimate object. Get a load of this ridiculous play: For anyone else, that would be the play of their lifetime. For Bradley Jr., that’s just a Wednesday. The man is superhuman. They should make a big-budget action movie about his outfield heroics. The catch kept the Red Sox alive; in the top of the 12th, Andrew Beninte ndi smoked a game-winning dinger to right, and Boston held on for the 2–1 victory.