Phenomenal Payton Tolle takes perfect game into sixth as Red Sox beat Yankees again

As bleak as the first half of the 2026 season has been for the Red Sox, it has featured radiant exceptions. Payton Tolle has been foremost among them.

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The mountainous lefthander increasingly looks like a present and future fixture of the rotation. On Friday night at Fenway Park against the Yankees, he delivered the most impressive outing of his career in a 6-1 win, the team’s second straight victory against the American League East leaders.

Tolle delivered seven shutout innings — the longest scoreless outing of his career — while permitting just one hit. The performance was more impressive given its context: Tolle was bedridden for most of Thursday and Friday with illness.

“I woke up [Friday] morning, I was like, ‘I don’t feel great, but I’m going to pitch today,’ ” said Tolle. “There were a couple of times where I was like, ‘Do I tell anybody?’ . . . [The outing] was a grinder one.”

Illness zapped Tolle’s typical zip. His four-seam fastball averaged 94.4 miles per hour — the lowest velocity of any start of his career.

So, rather than leaning solely on his typical hard/harder/hardest arsenal of four-seamers, sinkers, and cutters, Tolle focused more on precision and unbalancing hitters with flail-inducing two-strike curveballs. Of his seven strikeouts, three came on hooks.

The result: Artful dominance pointing to a deepening reservoir of skills. The lefthander carved the Yankees lineup with surgical precision and efficiency. He retired the first 16 batters, carrying a perfect game into the sixth inning before allowing a one-out single to shallow left by Spencer Jones on a cutter.

Was there a point when he contemplated perfection?

“Way too early,” Tolle smirked. “I might have thought about it in the third inning.”

Tolle didn’t get into a three-ball count until fatiguing in the seventh, when he issued back-to-back two-out walks. But with the Yankees amid their only rally against him, Tolle got Jazz Chisholm Jr. to fly to the warning track in center. He pumped his fist, then sauntered off the mound to a roaring salute from the (non-sellout) crowd of 33,353.

“It was a slow walk in, just because I wanted to look up and take it in,” said Tolle.

At 23 years and 237 days, Tolle (4-5, 2.78 ERA) became the youngest Sox pitcher to log at least seven shutout innings since Eduardo Rodriguez on Sept. 4, 2016. He also extended the streak of quality starts by the Sox rotation to nine games, the longest run for the team since Aug. 21-31, 2013.

The Sox mounted a steady offensive attack against Yankees starter Will Warren to give Tolle plenty of cushion. Wilyer Abreu tagged a first-inning triple to center and scored on a Willson Contreras RBI single for a 1-0 lead.

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The Sox stretched the lead to 3-0 in the second, a small-ball rally including Caleb Durbin’s bunt single and a run-scoring fielder’s choice by Friday callup Tsung-Che Cheng, the first RBI of the infielder’s career. Cheng later stung a double to center for his first big-league hit.

“I waited for this for a year,” said Cheng, who went 0 for 7 over a three-game big league debut with the Pirates last April. “It finally showed up.”

Contreras launched a solo homer, his 17th, onto Lansdowne Street on a hanging sweeper from Warren to make it 4-0 in the third.

The 418-foot blast hung over the subsequent innings. When Contreras batted in the fifth, one of Warren’s pitches to the first baseman was letter high and inside.

Contreras concluded Warren was sending a message, and on his way to first after being walked, conveyed verbal displeasure with the pitcher’s non-verbal communiqué.

“Part of the game,” Contreras shrugged of the disagreement. “Maybe people can look at it in different ways. I looked at it one way.”

Warren didn’t share the viewpoint, barking a retort. The conversation became animated, prompting the benches and bullpens of both teams to empty.

Temperatures quickly cooled without an altercation. As the crowd on the infield dispersed, Yankees catcher Ali Sánchez even hugged Contreras. Carlton Fisk and Thurman Munson this was not.

“Everybody went out there and stood around, had a picnic, then came back in,” mused interim Sox manager Chad Tracy.

Calm prevailed, and so did the Sox. The Yankees scrounged a run against the Sox bullpen in the eighth to avoid the ignominy of a shutout, but the Sox offense remained pesky, plating six runs for a third-straight night — tied for the team’s longest such streak this year — while cruising to a second straight home victory.

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