MIAMI -- There is no such thing as “away-from-home field” advantage, but if there was, the Red Sox may have had it on Tuesday night at loanDepot park. When Ceddanne Rafaela demolished his ninth homer of the year in the series opener vs. the Marlins, one thing was clear: There was an abundance of Boston fans in Miami.

It’s been an up-and-down season for Rafaela, whose fourth-inning homer plated the game-winning run in the Red Sox’s 8-3 win over the Marlins.

As soon as the ball left his bat, Rafaela seemed certain it was leaving the park. Left-fielder Bryan De La Cruz crashed into the fence as fans scrambled to retrieve the ball, which didn’t go particularly far -- a Statcast-projected 379 feet -- but it went high, peaking at 128 feet with a 37 degree launch angle. (For reference, Rafaela has averaged a 14.6 degree LA this year, and the MLB average is 12.3 degrees.)

While the Boston fans in the stands went wild, so did Rafaela’s teammates.

“It's crazy,” said Jarren Duran, who hit a homer of his own in the eighth inning. “I mean, we're always pumped for the guys -- and especially in a big moment like that for him -- and to put a good spin on it like that, we were all excited for him.”

Rafaela had a slow start to the season. His batting average hovered around .210, dipping below .200 for almost all of April and part of the month of May. Then, about four weeks ago, things started to click.

In early June, Rafaela started to hit his stride. It began with a 4-for-6 performance on June 6 against the White Sox, opening a stretch during which he went 22-for-47 over a nearly two-week stretch. Rafaela slashed .315/.344/.393 in the month of June, but he finished on a cold stretch -- 5-for-28 (.179) over his previous eight games entering Tuesday.

That homer, though, went a long way toward breaking that short downturn in Rafaela’s production. But it wasn’t the home run that manager Alex Cora took note of -- it was the quality of Rafaela’s at-bats.

Something the Red Sox have been looking for from Rafaela is patience at the plate. They want to see him taking more pitches and waiting for a pitch he can make work. So, when Rafaela saw five pitches in his second-inning plate appearance -- which ended with a groundout -- it was a start.

Then in the fourth inning, Rafaela took the first two pitches of his at-bat. Then he fouled off the next four offerings he saw before demolishing the seventh pitch Vallente Bellozo tossed him -- an 80.2 mph changeup.

“I was joking with him after the [first] two at-bats [that] he saw more pitches in two at-bats than the whole week last week,” Cora said. “He was swinging a lot. And with him, there's a balance, right? We want him to be aggressive, but we need him to be aggressive in the zone. And when he's swinging a lot -- when you swing at 70% of the pitches you see, you're going to be chasing 50% of them. That's the league.

“In the first at-bat he was very patient; in that [second] one he was trying to stay with a fastball the other way, got a changeup and hit it in the air.”

Of course, Rafaela was far from the only contributor for the Red Sox on Tuesday -- all nine Boston starters tallied a hit for the sixth time this season. Masataka Yoshida went 3-for-5, including a two-out RBI single in the seventh, and Connor Wong extended his MLB-leading hit streak to 16 games.

“It's good,” Cora said. “For how much we like South Beach and hanging out down here, sometimes we're worrying about coming from the off-day after hanging out yesterday and being sluggish. And that wasn't the case. They put some good at-bats, they ran the bases well and we played some good defense.”

While the entire Red Sox squad contributed to the win, when the Marlins attempted to rally with a two-run seventh inning, it was Rafaela’s long ball that ultimately made the difference.