July 22, 2022: Emotional Blue Jays bash Red Sox, 28-5, to set franchise run record

On July 22, 2022, the Toronto Blue Jays visited Fenway Park to play the Boston Red Sox in the first game of the season’s second half.

By many measures, the Blue Jays, who entered 2022 with high expectations, were doing well, if not great, with a 50-43 record. Toronto’s calling-card offense placed sixth in the majors in home runs, second in batting average, and fourth in OPS. Their rotation was in the middle of the pack but was headlined by All-Star Alek Manoah and Kevin Gausman, both with ERAs under 3.00 and more than 100 strikeouts apiece.1 

But a 2-9 stretch to begin July threatened everything. First, the team dropped both games of a doubleheader to the Tampa Bay Rays on July 2. In the middle of the second game, beloved first-base coach Mark Budzinski was informed his 17-year-old daughter had died in a boating accident.2 News slowly reached some players as they arrived at first base to find Budzinski not at his post.3 The grieving Blue Jays lost 11-5 and then 7-3 the next day.

Without a break, they flew west to play the 26-55 Oakland A’s and dropped the series. Afterward was Seattle, where thousands of Canadian fans had made the trip to root on the Blue Jays.4 It was the theater for a brutal four-game sweep, pushing Toronto 16½ games behind the first-place New York Yankees in the American League East Division and just two ahead of the Baltimore Orioles for last place.

By July 13, the Blue Jays had fired their manager, Charlie Montoyo. Toronto media saw Montoyo as a “human shield,” a scapegoat for underperforming players and questionable front- office decisions.5

Under dubious circumstances the Blue Jays won four of five games against the Philadelphia Phillies and Kansas City Royals.6 Now, under interim manager John Schneider, doubts still persisted.

The fourth-place Red Sox also limped to the second half. Despite Boston’s two separate seven-game winning streaks in June, when the Blue Jays took two of three from the Red Sox in late June, it kickstarted a 6-12 slide to enter the All-Star break.

To make matters worse, on July 17 Boston’s oft-injured Chris Sale was struck by a line drive and the southpaw suffered a broken left pinkie finger.7 It was just the first frame of his second start of 2022. The Red Sox were already in a difficult position after placing shortstop Trevor Story on the injured list the day before because of a bruised right hand.8 

This set the stage for an opportunity for either club to right the ship. Ultimately, as Budzinski returned to Toronto’s staff, it was the Blue Jays who would respond.9 And vigorously.

Toeing the rubber for Boston was Nathan Eovaldi, who was making his second start since missing more than a month with lower-back inflammation. In two prior starts against the Jays in 2022, both no-decisions, Eovaldi had surrendered only three runs in 11 2/3 innings. Toronto countered with Gausman, their $106 million man inked in the offseason to offset the loss of 2021 AL Cy Young winner Robbie Ray to the Seattle Mariners. He had faced the Red Sox twice in April and allowed just one earned run in 14 innings, coming away with a win and a no-decision.

The Blue Jays went ahead in the top of the first. Vladimir Guerrero Jr. hit a one-out double, took third on Alejandro Kirk’s single, and scored on Bo Bichette’s sacrifice fly. After a quick Boston half of the first, Matt Chapman’s two-run homer – his second of 2022 off Eovaldi and 16th overall – made it 3-0.10

This was only an appetizer for the Blue Jays’ third. Kirk singled to right with one out, Bichette doubled to left, and Teoscar Hernández walked. That put Lourdes Gurriel Jr. up with the bases loaded. In 2021 Gurriel logged a .545 batting average and four grand slams with the bases loaded. In said situations over the first half of 2022 the slugger already had one slam and was hitting .429 with 11 RBIs. But as baseball would have it, he didn’t homer – he singled to center, scoring Kirk and Bichette.11

One out later, Santiago Espinal followed suit with a single to right to bring in Hernández. Eovaldi then walked ninth-place hitter Danny Jansen before he was pulled from the game, now 6-0 in favor of the Blue Jays.

That situated relief pitcher Austin Davis, in his 35th appearance of the season, to clean up the bases-loaded mess with two outs. Raimel Tapia was the first hitter to face Davis. Tapia – one of baseball’s most consistent groundball hitters12 – got under the first pitch, easily over swinging on the sweeper and laying his bat down in frustration on what appeared to be an inning-ending fly out to center fielder Jarren Duran.

But Duran appeared to have never seen the ball, and it landed behind him on the warning track. Alex Verdugo hustled over from left to recover the ball as Gurriel, Espinal, Jansen, and, finally, Tapia came all the way around to score, blowing the game wide open and recording the majors’ first inside-the-park grand slam since 2017.13 It was Toronto’s second inside-the-park grand slam in franchise history, following one by rookie Junior Félix in 1989, also at Fenway Park.14 The Blue Jays had a 10-0 lead.

From there it was batting practice. Toronto plated four more in the fourth on Hernández’s solo homer and Jansen’s three-run shot. Gausman lost his shutout on Christian Vázquez’s bases-empty homer and Jackie Bradley Jr.’s two-run blast in the bottom of the fourth, but Toronto had 12 straight batters reach base against Kaleb Ort and Darwinzon Hernández after two outs in the fifth, resulting in a franchise-record-tying 11-run inning and a head-turning 25-3 score.15

After nine innings it was 28-5, allowing Toronto to set a franchise run record while also topping the Red Sox’ opponent run plateau, set in 1923.16 Gurriel tied a franchise record by recording six hits.17 Jansen hit two home runs and drove in six runs.18

Every Blue Jays starter scored at least two runs and recorded two hits while the seemingly helpless Red Sox continued to have on-field blunders, including a second baseball lost in the twilight on a seemingly routine infield popup to prolong the 11-run fifth.19 Before it was over, Boston’s mound parade had extended to infielder Yolmer Sanchez, who came in to play second base in the seventh inning and became the seventh and final Red Sox pitcher in the ninth, allowing a run on three hits. No doubt it brought back recent memories of the Blue Jays’ rout of Boston on June 13, 2021, when Toronto slugged eight home runs and won 18-4 at Fenway Park.

The Boston Globe headline the next day read, “They’re History,” “Jays Pound Sox Pitching into Paste.” The size of the usual “How the Runs Scored” column was massive as it detailed the play-by-play account of the Blue Jays’ onslaught.20

The first lines of the Toronto Star game story read: “It was The Massacre on Jersey Street, formerly 4 Yawkey Way. If Fenway Park had a roof, it would have caved in under the barrage of Blue Jays hits and ding-dongs.” There was also a subhead that read “The Twilight Zone.”21

Boston’s Rafael Devers went on the injured list ahead of the series’ second game, which the Blue Jays won, 4-1.22 In Sunday afternoon’s finale, Boston made three errors and Toronto won again, 8-4.

All in all, the Blue Jays recovered and went 46-28 under Schneider en route to 92 wins. The win over Boston said definitively that their yet-to-actually-win, home-run jacket-wearing team was a force in the AL East. Meanwhile, the Red Sox fell apart and limped toward a last-place record of 78-84.

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Carl Riechers and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Photo credit: Lourdes Gurriel Jr., Trading Card Database.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted the following sites for a significant amount of research: Retrosheet.org, Baseball-Reference.com, BaseballSavant.com, and Fangraphs.com. Unless otherwise listed, Retrosheet was used for official game records and play-by-play, Baseball Reference was used for standings information, Baseball Savant was used for Statcast information, pitcher data and metrics, while Fangraphs was used for player and team splits, leaderboards, and advanced statistics. 

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/BOS/BOS202207220.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/2022/B07220BOS2022.htm

Notes

1 Entering the game, the Blue Jays ranked 13th, 11th, and 15th in baseball for ERA, WHIP, and K%.

2 Shi Davidi, “Blue Jays Continue Grieving with Budzinski Family amid Non-Stop Baseball Schedule,” Sportsnet, July 5, 2022, https://www.sportsnet.ca/mlb/article/as-blue-jays-mourn-for-budzinski-family-baseballs-non-stop-schedule-becomes-a-burden/.

3 Davidi.

4 Rob Longley, “Team Reeling on and off the Field: Toronto Blue Jays,” Halifax (Nova Scotia) Chronicle Herald, July 12, 2022: C3.

5 Cathal Kelly, “The Blue Jays Get Their Fall Guy in Charlie Montoyo, but Now the Brain Trust Is Exposed: Charlie Montoyo Wasn’t There to Turn Anything Around – He Was There to Act as a Human Shield,” Globe and Mail, July 13, 2022, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/article-blue-jays-fire-charlie-montoyo/.

6 The Blue Jays’ three-game series against the Royals before the All-Star break took place under strange circumstances. Because of Canadian pandemic protocols, 10 Royals were prevented from entering Canada, presumably all because of vaccination status. Ostensibly this gave the Blue Jays a massive advantage. After dropping the opener, Toronto won the series. 

7 Jelani Scott, “Chris Sale Leaves Game After Getting Hit in Pinky by Line Drive vs. Yankees,” Sports Illustrated, July 17, 2022, https://www.si.com/mlb/2022/07/17/chris-sale-leaves-game-hit-pinky-line-drive-red-sox-yankees.

8 Julian McWilliams, “Red Sox Place Trevor Story (Bruised Right Hand) on 10-Day Injured List,” Boston Globe, July 16, 2022, https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/07/16/sports/red-sox-place-trevor-story-bruised-hand-10-day-injured-list/.

9 Keegan Matheson, “Support after Tragedy,” MLB.com, July 22, 2022, https://www.mlb.com/news/mark-budzinski-returns-to-blue-jays-after-loss-of-daughter.

10 “Matt Chapman’s Two-Run Homer,” MLB.com, July 22, 2022, https://www.mlb.com/video/nathan-eovaldi-in-play-run-s-to-lourdes-gurriel-jr?partnerId=web_video-playback-page_video-share.

11 “Gurriel Jr.’s Two-Run Single,” MLB.com, July 22, 2022, https://www.mlb.com/video/nathan-eovaldi-in-play-run-s-to-lourdes-gurriel-jr?partnerId=web_video-playback-page_video-share.

12 Tapia was MLB’s leader in groundball percentage from 2018 to 2021, posting a league-high 67.4 percent figure in 2021 with the Colorado Rockies, 11.9 percentage points higher than second-place Eric Hosmer.

13 “Inside-the-Park Grand Slam for Raimel Tapia!!” YouTube video (MLB.com), 3:00, accessed October 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ojr-_L3IHc4. It was the first inside-the-park grand slam since Michael A. Taylor of the Washington Nationals hit one in 2017.

14 McWilliams, “They’re History.”

15 It was the fifth time in franchise history that the Blue Jays scored 11 runs in an inning. The first occurred with many of the same hitters less than a year earlier, on September 11, 2021. In the second game of a doubleheader, the Jays were at Camden Yards playing the AL-worst Orioles. Despite being held hitless through six innings by Orioles starter Keegan Akin, the Jays managed 11 runs on 11 hits and four home runs in the seventh inning. The Blue Jays won, 11-2. They also achieved the feat in 1984, 1995, and 2007.

16 The Blue Jays’ previous record for runs scored in a game was in their 24-10 win over the Orioles on June 26, 1978. The Red Sox had lost 27-3 to the Cleveland Indians in the first game of a doubleheader on July 7, 1923. Rosie DiManno, “Three Things: Blue Jays Humiliate Red Sox at Fenway with Franchise Record 28 Runs,” Toronto Star, July 22, 2022, https://www.thestar.com/sports/blue-jays/three-things-blue-jays-humiliate-red-sox-at-fenway-with-franchise-record-28-runs/article_d7567da7-1a28-5eca-9124-e07012d758b5.html.

17 DiManno, “Three Things.”

18 In addition to Jansen’s big night, several other catchers also had big offensive games. Regular Blue Jays’ catcher Kirk, who spent the game at designated hitter, went 3-for-6. Regular Red Sox catcher Vázquez, who started at first base and moved to second, went 3-for-4 with two home runs, perhaps landing him a World Series ring by increasing his stock enough to get dealt to the Houston Astros nine days later. Kevin Plawecki, who caught all nine innings and 228 pitches for Boston, also went 3-for-4.

19 DiManno, “Three Things.”

20 McWilliams, “They’re History.”

21 DiManno, “Three Things.”

22 “Red Sox Place Rafael Devers on Injured List with Right Hamstring Inflammation,” Sportsnet, July 23, 2022: https://www.sportsnet.ca/mlb/article/red-sox-place-rafael-devers-on-injured-list-with-right-hamstring-inflammation/.