Wednesday marked one of the Red Sox’s cleanest wins of the season, but things nearly took an ugly turn with two outs in the bottom of the eighth.
After Phillies shortstop Edmundo Sosa hit a routine pop-up behind home plate that should have easily ended the inning, Connor Wong stepped on Sosa’s foot and rolled his right ankle. The Red Sox catcher went down in a heap, forcing pitcher Garrett Whitlock to make an athletic sliding catch to salvage the play and end the inning.
Wong was subsequently checked by the trainers and did not return when the Red Sox came back out on defense for the top of the ninth. But while the club won’t know for sure until tomorrow, interim manager Chad Tracy said it appears Wong should be ok.
“They did some quick images, everything’s negative, he was able to kind of jump on it,” Tracy said. “Just felt a little discomfort pushing off of it and going into the last inning if we have to make a throw or something if he can’t do that let’s go ahead and make that move. So I think we’re going to be ok but we’ll know more tomorrow.”
“(I feel) good, it’s a little sore, I’ve done this one before much worse,” Wong said in the home clubhouse later. “So everything we did seemed like it’s going to be fine so we’ll see how it is in the morning and go from there.”
Tracy and Wong both praised Whitlock for having the awareness to make the catch himself, with Wong noting that the Red Sox right-hander made a similar play a couple of years ago. Whitlock said that while the whole thing seemed to play out in slow motion, he didn’t have enough time to think much and just reacted.
“My mind was like ‘alright we got out of it,’ and then I was like ‘holy crap Connor’s in the dirt, I hope he’s ok,’ then it’s like ‘wait a minute the ball’s still in the air, I need to go,’” Whitlock said, adding that his teammates joked with him that he should have made the catch standing up.