Hot streak turns Red Sox into buyers 

This story was excerpted from Ian Browne’s Red Sox Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

It was June 29 and the Red Sox had just been swept at home by the Miami Marlins in a three-game series, scoring an aggregate three runs in the process.

Roughly a month before the Tuesday's Trade Deadline, Boston -- two games under .500 at the time -- was shaping up as a seller.

The club was 15 games behind in the loaded American League East and five games behind the Blue Jays for the third Wild Card spot.

That was the same night the downtrodden Sox flew to Toronto for a three-game series. If the slide had continued with another sweep, manager Alex Cora’s team could have returned from Canada trailing by a whopping eight games.

But then came the well-timed surge which hasn’t ended yet. The Sox were the ones who did the sweeping in Toronto, capped by a thrilling Sunday afternoon comeback in the finale. Then they took two out of three from the Rangers, one of the top teams in the AL.

It was the start of a 15-5 run that continued with Wednesday’s impressive 5-3 victory that completed a two-game sweep of the Braves, the team with the best record in MLB.

The standings look a lot better today for Boston than they did on June 29. Not only are the Sox just 1 ½ games behind the Jays in the Wild Card hunt, but they are seven games behind in the AL East.

To transform themselves from likely seller to near-definite buyer, the Sox dug deep, even with three starting pitchers on the injured list in Chris Sale, Tanner Houck and Garrett Whitlock. They dug their way out even while waiting for Trevor Story, who is now on a Minor League rehab assignment and should be back with the Sox by early August.

Cora has masterfully pieced together his pitching staff, often going with bullpen games two out of every five games.

The offense has found its groove, led by Rafael Devers, a red-hot leader in Justin Turner, the steady Masataka Yoshida and two young players who have found their way big time in Triston Casas and Jarren Duran.

“I’ve got to give credit to those guys in that clubhouse,” Cora said. “You know, they're grinding, they’re playing hard, they’re doing everything possible to make it interesting.

“Now, if you start looking, it’s not only the Wild Card. I think the division is coming back to Earth. We know we're going to play a lot of games against the Orioles and the Rays and all that stuff. What looked impossible two months ago or a month ago, we were down, what 15 games? Now it’s down to seven. So we'll keep shooting up there and see what happens.”

And it will be interesting to see what chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom can make happen.

The Red Sox are basically set on the position-player side, particularly with Story’s imminent return.

What they need is some pitching help, preferably in the rotation.

“There's a lot of different things that we're going to have conversations about,” Bloom said. “I hope that it's become more visible, especially over the last several weeks, that a lot of what we've been talking about with trying to have a core that wins, not just now, but that we can keep winning, that a lot of that is starting to be more visible by the day.

“You just need to look at the [standings] to know we're not where we want to be yet, but it's also not something that you need to close your eyes and dream on. And so really, our North Star is just continuing to advance the ball there. Continuing to build our core. Those are going to be the most attractive opportunities for us.

“And that's going to be something that we use as basically kind of a lens through which we'll look at anything that we could do. There's a lot of different things that could fit into that. Obviously, we want to make this group as strong as we can, if we can add more core contributors, that's something we'd love to do.”

Bloom doesn’t sound compelled to trade prospects for rental players. He’d rather acquire cost-controllable players who can help the club, not just this year, but beyond.

“I think, generally speaking, with the way we've been trying to build this and also the position we're in, usually when you're in the position we're in now and you start selling out for rentals, that often doesn't go well,” Bloom said. “Obviously, those guys that you can keep with you, those tend to be bigger acquisitions.”