Sonny Gray was the rock in Denver on Tuesday, as Red Sox recovered from catastrophic loss behind a stellar start
DENVER — For Sonny Gray, the key to pitching at Coors Field, hitters haven, had nothing to do with the physical challenges.
It was all mental.
Before tossing perhaps his best game of the year Tuesday night, leading the Red Sox to a 5-2 win over the Rockies, Gray had heard all the horror stories about pitching at high altitude and decided to pay them no mind. He has made a career out of throwing breaking balls — he does so “better than anyone in baseball,” he said in December — and figured this occasion should be no different.
“I can spin the ball on the moon,” Gray said.
And so he spun the ball on the moon — or in the mountains, at least.
Gray struck out a season-high 11 batters across a season-high-tying seven innings. The Rockies managed six hits and three walks against him, but only one run, on Willi Castro’s second-inning homer.
“When you see a guy go out there and just dominate his craft like that — he’s giving it his all — it just helps everybody else behind him want to play just as hard,” said Nate Eaton, who reached base four times and totaled two doubles, two RBIs, and two runs scored.
Interim manager Chad Tracy said: “Exceptional.”
Gray got off to an, ahem, rocky start when he issued a four-pitch walk to his first batter, Jake McCarthy, he of the walkoff, three-run triple Monday night. Then Gray “said some things to myself,” he explained, and snapped back into it.
A big part of that: rejecting the idea that pitching in historically the most hitter-friendly active ballpark in the majors, where breaking balls often don’t break, is difficult. He has lasted exactly seven innings and given up exactly one run in his only two starts in Colorado, the other coming in 2019.
Of the 16 swings-and-misses induced by Gray, 13 came on his sweeper, the offering he threw more than any other.
“You just have to flip your mindset, because I think this place is — it is what it is,” Gray said. “If you give it like an inch in your mental space, then it can start to take over. Obviously, I think it’s important to be aware that you’re pitching at elevation, but at the same time, once you start making excuses and stuff like that, then it just kind of wears on you and then you lose your confidence out there.
“I’m just tricking my mind into believing that it can do anything. So it’s just another place.”
Gray lowered his ERA to 2.95. If he had enough innings to qualify for the leaderboards — he is two outs shy of doing so — he would be fifth in the American League.
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“That was a fun game,” he said. “That was a good win.”
Incredibly, a day after their worst loss of the season, Aroldis Chapman’s first blown save in 11 months, fun was a theme. At 32-45, the Red Sox inched ahead of the Rockies (31-49) in the race for the fewest wins in the majors.
Lefthander Sean Sullivan, an Andover native who attended Tabor Academy, started for the Rockies and navigated five innings while holding the Sox to three runs. That was a win of sorts considering he worked around a ton of traffic on the bases: five hits and five walks.
His primary problem was Wilyer Abreu, who socked an RBI triple to right-center field in the first inning, scoring Eaton, and hammered a solo home run to right-center in the fifth.
Abreu’s longball, his 10th of the year and fourth of the month, went an estimated 443 feet.
But that first run may have been even more important. An immediate lead was noteworthy in the team’s attempt to rebound from their messy Monday.
“No matter what happened the day before, being able to get a run over early helps everyone,” Eaton said.
Tracy said of Eaton, the leadoff man for the day: “He gives us a spark.”
The delightful footnote to Abreu’s first game: He grew up a Rockies fan because he liked former All-Star Carlos Gonzalez, a franchise standout from 2009-18. He is from Maracaibo, Venezuela, same as Abreu.
“He had a really good flow when he was playing baseball, so he just was fun to watch,” Abreu said.
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They have never met.
“Not yet,” he said. “But maybe sometime.”
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