“I admire it,” Correa said, “because I will tell you, I won’t be able to do it. Sitting down for that long and going out there against a guy throwing 100 at crunchtime. That’s special.”
Castro fouled off a 98-mile-per-hour fastball to make the count 1-2, and then just about froze when he saw the curveball coming in high, just before it dipped into that debatable quadrant on the far corner.
“Because of where it’s coming from, it’s never in the zone until maybe at the very end,” Castro said, perhaps conceding that it should have been called a strike. “It’s one of those pitches that’s tough to get called, or to even make it look like a strike.”
His gamble to watch the pitch instead of swing at it paid off, and Eovaldi and the Red Sox pitchers never recovered. A dozen batters came to the plate in the half inning.
There was some grumbling about Diaz’s strike zone during the game. Cora had to be restrained while vehemently arguing a called third strike against J.D. Martinez in the third inning, which made him wary of doing so later, when it mattered far more.
“I told him, I said, ‘I’m not going to get thrown out of this game, but we thought it was a strike,’” Cora said, “and he disagreed with us.”