The Red Sox Deserve a Miracle Too

Folarin Balogun’s red card reversal was pure fantasy—the kind of sport-defying intervention that makes you wonder what it would take for baseball to grant the same mercy. The U.S. men’s soccer team got a gift on a travel day for Boston, and it raises an uncomfortable question: what controversial call would the Red Sox actually need reversed to matter?

Here’s the thing about baseball grudges. They don’t fade like a bad memory. They calcify. They define seasons. Craig Breslow’s front office has built this roster to compete in a brutally tight AL East, and yet we all know that one strikeout call, one check-swing judgment, one interference ruling in October could erase months of work. That’s not hyperbole—it’s the sport’s foundational cruelty.

If we’re daydreaming about reversals, they’d have to matter. Not some July dead-ball call in a blowout. We’re talking about the kind of decision that swallows a playoff series whole. A walk-off strikeout where the catcher framed it perfectly but the pitch lived two inches outside. A safe call at second base that decides a Wild Card game. The kind of moment where Alex Cora has to accept the outcome even though everyone in the stadium knows better.

The real fantasy here isn’t that baseball would reverse a call—it’s that MLB would ever admit it got something wrong at a moment that actually mattered. Soccer gave Balogun and the USMNT a second chance. In baseball, you don’t get those. You get umpires doing their best in real time, and sometimes their best isn’t good enough. That’s just the game.

So maybe instead of wishing for miracles, we should appreciate that the Red Sox roster—with Chapman’s edge in the pen and the stability in the rotation—is built to win games where the calls go either way. That’s all you can control.