Rafael Devers went 4-for-6 with three RBI while Tommy Pham and Reese McGuire were 3-for-4 as the Boston Red Sox cruised to a 13-3 win over the visiting Kansas City Royals on Sunday afternoon.
Bookending the Boston (71-75) lineup, which recorded 20 hits, Pham drove in three runs and scored three more, and McGuire had two RBI and scored two runs.
Xander Bogaerts (2-for-4) became the fourth Red Sox player ever to record 1,400 career hits before turning 30. He reached the milestone on an RBI double in the first inning.
Nick Pivetta punched out seven over five innings of seven-hit, three-run ball as Boston bookended the weekend series with victories.
Salvador Perez, Vinnie Pasquantino and Drew Waters had two hits apiece for the Royals (58-89), who went 1-5 on their six-game road trip.
Kansas City southpaw Kris Bubic (2-13) allowed five runs on seven hits, walked three and struck out two in 2 2/3 innings.
Pasquantino lined a run-scoring double to right to lift the Royals in the opening frame. MJ Melendez drew a leadoff walk and advanced on a wild pitch before crossing home with two outs.
Boston began with three consecutive hits, as the Bogaerts RBI double followed singles by Pham and Devers.
The teams also traded runs in the second. A one-out walk hurt Pivetta as Drew Waters doubled to right to bring Nate Eaton home from first, but Pham’s sacrifice fly to center brought in Enrique Hernandez after a leadoff walk.
After Pivetta worked around a pair of one-out singles to post a scoreless inning, the Red Sox used a three-run third to take a 5-2 lead.
A Bogaerts shift-beating single and J.D. Martinez’s sun-aided double set up Rob Refsnyder and Christian Arroyo for sac flies, while McGuire’s RBI knock to center followed walks to Hernandez and Yu Chang.
Perez crushed a homer to inside the left-field foul pole in the Royals’ fifth, but the hosts made it 7-3 when Devers dropped a bases-loaded, two-out, two-run single into right.
Boston broke the game open with four consecutive run-scoring hits in the sixth.
The inning started with Martinez’s 40th double of the season before a Hernandez RBI single plated the first of those runs. Chang and McGuire followed with doubles before a Pham single capped the stretch.
In the eighth, Pham’s double and a Devers single added runs for the Red Sox and brought them to 20 hits.
–Field Level Media
