It tells you plenty about the American League East that there are actually bigger surprises so far than the Red Sox -- who beat the Blue Jays again on Tuesday night -- and in the process, they made it two in a row against a team that beat them 16 times in 19 chances a year ago.

The Rays, of course, are a huge surprise, starting off the way they have -- 24-6 through Tuesday night -- and hitting for power the way they have. So are the upstart Orioles, right there behind the Rays at 20-9. And if you had the Yankees, and not the Red Sox, being in last place in the division a little over a month into things, run and buy a lottery ticket.

But still, a Red Sox team that got swept at home by the Pirates in their second series of the season and then went to The Trop and got swept in a four-game series by the Rays continues to surprise everybody with how much stick they have, how they fight as hard as any team in baseball and how much fun they have been to watch as they’ve gone 12-6 since the Rays swept them.

Here is what they did Tuesday after the Blue Jays scored six two-out runs against Tanner Houck in the fifth inning to take a 6-3 lead:

They came back again, because this Red Sox team does that, at least so far. It started with manager Alex Cora, as good as there is, sending Houck back out for the top of the sixth after he’d ended the inning before by giving up a three-run homer to Daulton Varsho.

“We didn’t need five from him,” Cora said later. “We needed six.”

After that, they needed two rousing home runs from catcher Connor Wong, who came to Boston along with Alex Verdugo (one of the stars of the American League season so far with three walk-off hits already), the last one from Wong in the eighth to put the Sox ahead for good. Wong now has three home runs and eight RBIs in his past 10 games, to go with a .433 batting average over that period. And he missed having a three-homer night by a few feet his first time up.

“He’s got pop,” Cora said wryly of Wong on a night when Wong’s first homer had come against Toronto’s Zach Pop.

So far this season, it seems as if just about everybody in Cora’s lineup has pop. His Sox are now second in baseball in batting. They lost Adam Duvall to a left wrist injury after he’d hit four home runs in his first eight games, called up Jarren Duran from Triple-A Worcester to replace him and all Duran has done since then is hit .396 and be one of the hottest hitters anywhere. On Monday, Verdugo had produced another walk-off, a home run to right off Jordan Romano, making Verdugo only the third hitter in more than 100 years (the others were Andruw Jones and Bobby Bonds) to have three walk-off hits in his team’s first 30 games.

On Tuesday night, the last, big swing for the Red Sox came in the eighth from Wong on what was a career night for him. But just as much magic, at least from the Red Sox point of view, came from Josh Winckowski in the top of the ninth, when he needed just seven pitches to finish off a Blue Jays team that had a plus-70 run differential against the Red Sox in 2022. Winckowski had pitched two innings on Monday night, but Kenley Jansen still had a sore back, so Winckowski got his first chance to close.

“Honestly, I wanted to stay away from him, but the game dictated something else,” Cora said after the game.

Then Cora watched as it went this way for his emergency closer: popup, single, double-play ball, ballgame. And the Red Sox had taken the first two of a four-game series against the team that had done everything to the Sox a year ago except make them sweep the stands after games.

The Red Sox are still in fourth place. But after Tuesday night, they were just two games behind the Blue Jays in the loss column. And they really have been surprisingly, sometimes improbably, fun.

They won their first game of the season after Ryan McKenna of the Orioles dropped a routine fly ball that should have ended that game. They rallied against the Angels with the help of what was the second catcher’s interference call of that game. They blew a 6-1 lead against the Guardians the other day and came back to win 8-7 when -- who else? -- Verdugo knocked in Boston’s second run in the bottom of the 10th. They are doing this with Rafael Devers, their best player, hitting just .227, even though he does have 10 homers so far.

“We knew [Masataka] Yoshida, Verdugo, [Justin] Turner all have a great approach and know Raffy is going to be OK,” Cora said on Wednesday morning. “The young kids -- Duran, Wong, [Enmanuel] Valdez are doing a great job. [Christian] Arroyo, Rob Refsnyder, Raimel Tapia, Reese McGuire always contribute. We are solid and grind."

In a tough week in Boston sports that saw the Bruins lose Game 7 against the Panthers and the Celtics lose Game 1 to a Sixers team without league MVP Joel Embiid, it is the Red Sox, for now, who have been the biggest game in town. It wasn’t supposed to be that way in the first week of May. Surprise.