Xander Bogaerts hitting the first of a pair of home runs to kick off the Thursday night massacre; the second bomb he wanted to hit when he spotted Mom in the seats.

The carnage began in the bottom of the first and finished by the bottom of the eighth. And when Nathan Eovaldi, the Red Sox’s resurrected pitching toy moved to the bullpen upon his return, shook off a one-out single to turn the Yankees aside in the top of the ninth, even the Fenway Park faithful who thought they’d seen everything in this century-plus old rivalry were too exhausted to cheer.

They may even have been too exhausted to wonder what maybe everyone else in baseball wondered, namely why Yankee manager Aaron Boone had no apparent way to keep his All-Star starting pitcher Masahiro Tanaka from taking maybe the worst beating of his major league life. Or, why the Yankees had no apparent way to stop the Red Sox from burying them 19-3, the worst the Red Sox ever laid on the Yankees in the entire history of their to-the-death rivalry.

A twelve-run beating all earned in three and a third innings’ work. A beating that only began when Tanaka couldn’t get a single Red Sox out in the bottom of the first, before Xander Bogaerts with first and second jumped on a down-and-in fastball and drove it over the Green Monster seats onto the street. A beating that ended when Tanaka surrendered a two-run ground rule double down the right field line to Mitch Moreland in the fourth.

Tanaka had his relief Stephen Tarpley to thank for surrendering number twelve on his dollar. Leaving him the most badly-abused pitcher in Fenway since then-Red Sox manager Bobby Valentine, also inexplicably, left his starter Jon Lester in to take an eleven-run battering in 2012. If these were marriages, Tanaka and Lester could have demanded domestic violence charges.

Taking one for the team? Ancient imperial Japan’s legendarily notorious World War II kamikaze pilots launched with better survival odds.

Maybe Boone didn’t want to incinerate his own bullpen too early, and maybe you get that to an extent, but the extent ends when a Tanaka who’d just been torn for five earned in five innings against the Rockies in his previous start barely escapes the first with seven runs and then gets sent forth for further use, misuse, and abuse.

It actually looked as though Tanaka might survive after Bogaerts’ blast, the longest of the Red Sox shortstop’s career, when he got J.D. Martinez to fly out to center immediately following. And even when the Red Sox loaded the bases on him just as immediately, his odds increased when he got Christian Vasquez on a measly pop out to Gleyber Torres, the Yankee shortstop whose RBI single in the second accounted for a third of the Yankee runs on the night.

But then Jackie Bradley, Jr. tore a two-run double to right and Mookie Betts, the defending American League Most Valuable Player, tore an immediate two-run double to the back of the park. Just like that, Tanaka’s hope of coming out of the first with his Yankees staying within reach disappeared almost as fast as Bogaerts’ bomb.

About the only thing that could possibly disappoint Bogaerts was that his mother, his uncle, and a couple of his Little League coaches hadn’t arrived in Fenway in time to see the first-inning blast. The Aruba native wanted nothing more than to hit one out with Mom in the ballpark. He got his wish—in the bottom of the eighth.

By which time the Yankees decided their pitching staff was abused enough for the night and Boone sent catcher Austin Romine to the mound to take one for the team. Did he ever. Red Sox catcher Sandy Leon pounded a two-run homer into the right center field bullpen with nobody out. Then, after third baseman Rafael Devers flied out, up stepped Bogaerts.

“The last at-bat,” Bogaerts said after the massacre, “I saw my mom there and I was like, ‘I’m going to try’.” Romine threw something up to the plate that hung so high it might get a real pitcher convicted by his team’s kangaroo court if it has one. And the only thing keeping Bogaerts’s launch from leaving the ballpark entirely this time, with the nineteenth Red Sox run, was the National Car Rental sign atop the back of the Monster seats.

Just a week after Boone made headlines with a vulgar rant at an umpire in which he called his players “savages” in the batter’s box to raise his esteem among Yankee fans, and Yankee first baseman Luis Voit turned the rant into T-shirt fodder for his mates,  it was the Red Sox looking like savages enough with 23 hits on the night to make the Yankees—with all of seven hits and three almost excuse-us runs on the board—think twice about savagery as motivation.

Some record books took almost as much of a beating as the Yankees did Thursday night. Eight Red Sox had at least two runs batted in on the night to tie a major league record. For the first time in the rivalry’s history the Red Sox beat the Yankees with a sixteen-run differential. For the first time ever, a Yankee starting pitcher surrendered twelve runs or more while getting ten outs or less.

And if you thought the Yankees got sunk by the Red Sox, the forty runs Yankee starters have allowed over their past five games is the most in any five-game stretch of Yankee starting pitching since the year the Titanic sunk. Thursday night the Red Sox were the iceberg. Not even a Yankee ship that’s pretty sharp at coming in from behind this year could avoid that.

And it almost doesn’t matter that before this five-game struggle Yankee starters had a fourteen-game run in which they posted a collective 2.88 ERA. All season long the Yankee rotation’s been in enough need of an upgrade. All month long the eyes of trade deadline watchers have been on whomever the Yankees might have eyes for.

This five-game stretch is probably going to drive the price for any trade deadline upgrades upward. Sellers must have looked at Thursday night’s climax to the five-game leaking and said, “Thank you, Boston Red Sox!” Not that they’re going to get super rich in the return hauls, necessarily. But they might maybe be able to hold the Yankees up for a little bit more out of the prospect bank than the Yankees might have thought they’d have to surrender.

Meanwhile, Red Sox starting pitcher Rick Porcello has been living something of a charmed life of late. Thursday night’s were the lowest amount of earned runs he’s surrendered in his four July starts—all of which got him credited with wins. He gave up six each against the Tigers and the Orioles, teams not necessarily known for striking fear into the hearts of opponents this season, and he surrendered four to the Blue Jays in a mid-month assignment.

“It seems like the last three or four games I pitched we put up damn near 20 runs,” Porcello said in something of a daze after Thursday night’s thrashing. “Run support is huge. And when we’re scoring like this, you do the best you can not to screw it up.”

And the Red Sox must be thinking it was one hell of a way to get motivated for what could well be their last stand. They go from hosting the Yankees this weekend to hosting the Rays—from whom they took two of three in Tampa Bay before they sank the Yankees Thursday night—for three at Fenway before going to the south Bronx to meet the Yankees for four more.

They’re still ten games back in the American League East and a game and a half back of the league’s second wild card. If the Red Sox are going to make their season once and for all, this may be the stretch in which to do it once and for all. Because by the time they meet the Yankees for a final set of the season in September in Fenway, the weekends and week to come may have sealed their fate. May.

“We were coming from a horrible series and bounced back [against the Rays],” said Red Sox manager Alex Cora. “Now it’s New York, the best team in baseball. Win this series and see where it takes us. Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. We know what we have to do. There’s no hiding.”

They surely reminded the Savages about no place to hide Thursday night. But was it the Red Sox’s continuing re-ignition or just what a certain lady once said on the radio might be just a fancy passing?

Pablo Sandoval ends Tuesday night’s game with an opposite-field bomb to win the Giants’ sixteenth of nineteen in July so far.

One month ago every smart dollar was ready to go down on Madison Bumgarner spending the stretch drive in a different uniform. And, every dumb dollar, including numerous held by the Mets themselves, was going down on the Mets clinging to Berra’s Law. (It ain’t over until it’s over.)

That was before the Giants—almost twenty games out of first in the National League West and not even a blip on the wild card radar, both as of the end of May—found ways to spend all July thus far winning sixteen of nineteen, and Bumgarner, with a 2.00 ERA from 25 June through this morning, became Bumgarner again. Somehow.

And, before they took three out of four from the Mets in AT&T Park last weekend, with all three wins coming in the bottom of the extra innings. Including the sixteen-inning series opener in which Mets uber-rookie Pete Alonso hit one through the hovering seagulls into the left field seats in the top of the sixteenth, but Mets reliever Chris Mazza couldn’t buy an out if he’d paid triple its worth in the bottom.

Almost nobody but the Mets themselves thought a good showing in San Francisco would keep them within reach of even a National League wild card. But then almost nobody but the Giants themselves saw them entering July with anything more than an extremely outside prayer of living long enough to even think about such a reach.

The problem with Berra’s Law is that sometimes it’s over before you want, wish, or expect it to be. And if the Mets rudely interrupted the Giants with an 11-4 shellacking in the third game of the set, it proved to be more rude than disruptive and just a mere disruption of the nails being hammered into their 2019 coffin.

Before July it looked like the Giants weren’t going to give final-year manager Bruce Bochy his and their fondest wish of one more postseason visit. Helluva way to send into retirement the guy who piloted them to three World Series rings in a five-season string. Then came July, and before they took care of the Mets:

* They swept the Padres in three to open the month.

* They took two out of three from the Cardinals and from the Brewers in succession.

* They swept the Rockies in Colorado, including a series-opening, doubleheader-opening 19-2 nuking highlighted by Brandon Crawford’s 5-for-6 including eight runs batted in, including a mammoth three-run homer down the left field line in the middle of a five-run first.

* For good measure, they hosted the Cubs to win a series opener Tuesday night with their fourth walk-off win in six games—and, once again, in extra innings, when Pablo Sandoval checked in at the plate with one out in the bottom of the thirteenth, and Kung Fu Panda sliced one the other way just over the left field fence. The bad news: no seagulls were anywhere near in danger of a conk on the head en route.

“This is the best stretch I’ve ever been part of,” Bumgarner crowed after the 5-4 win. He has no idea. The last time the Giants won four walkoffs in six games? Their first year in San Francisco, 1958, and also during July while they were at it.

And as Jon Heyman—longtime CBS Sports writer turned proprietor of FanCred Sports, which grants me the honour of publishing my writings now and then—said in a Tuesday tweet, “Few see MadBum going anywhere now. Things can change in a hurry but this is typical from rival exec: ‘No way Giants can sell, they’re on fire’.”

The Giants would have to experience a Mets-like collapse for their incumbent streak to turn that swiftly into a pleasant but outlying 2019 memory. And the Mets were into that collapse long before the Giants hosted them so bitterly last weekend. Bitterly for the Mets, that is.

The Giants haven’t got even a small degree of the Mets’ issues. Not even if Bumgarner still can’t resist giving the other guys T-shirt troll material now and again. It’s actually beginning to look like Bochy will get one more postseason visit before he puts paid to his distinguished managing career. He’s the only skipper of the new century to have three World Series rings for his fingers.

For a team whose neophyte general manager entered spring training challenging the league, “Come and get us,” the Mets don’t have egg on their faces, they have omelettes. Brodie Van Wagenen thought he’d put together a team to strike fear into the hearts of his division and his league, and the only hearts into which the Mets struck any fear were the hearts filling Citi Field.

He watched and once in awhile tried meddling as one after another week there came one after another Mets crisis of dubious play, dubious tactics, dubious strategy, and dubious behaviour. He watched his inherited manager offer one after another mealymouthed explanation of all going wrong and still gave the man more votes of confidence in one season than most on-the-rocks managers get in five.

He watched a mostly solid group of starting pitchers left to the mercy of a mal-handled bullpen including and especially the live closer he’d brought aboard—accepting an aging second baseman whose Hall of Fame-looking years were too far in the rear view mirror to be visible without a telescope—in his most notable off-season deal. Now that deal looks like gravy for the Mariners and castor oil for the Mets.

Never mind that Robinson Cano, the aging second baseman in question, played almost entirely like an aging second baseman until Tuesday night. The terminal optimist says his three hefty bombs against the Padres means Cano finding some kind of revival. The terminal realist says it’s closer to the three Babe Ruth blasted in his sixth-to-last game as a weary Boston Brave. Ruth was 40 at that time. Cano is four years younger and looks almost as weary otherwise.

And because Van Wagenen fell for it when the Mariners insisted he take Cano and his albatross contract off their hands if they wanted Edwin Diaz that badly, it forced manager Mickey Callaway to install Cano at second base while sending a promising young second baseman, Jeff McNeil, to a couple of outfield stations and elsewhere around the infield when needed.

Van Wagenen should count his blessings that the shuffle didn’t affect McNeil at the plate. Every other Met watcher with even a single functioning brain cell still can’t fathom why Van Wagenen was that accepting of having Cano jammed down his throat when the Mets’ second baseman of the future was right there ready to make his bones.

With the bullpen dubiously built and more dubiously maintained, what a surprise Diaz went from shutdown to shattered, and what a surprise their apparent most reliable earlier-in-the-game reliever, Robert Gsellman, devolved into an inconsistent mess. (Or should that be Mess?)

When Van Wagenen reacted with nothing to the unconscionable attacks Callaway and his pitcher Jason Vargas unleashed postgame on a reporter doing nothing worse than his job, after yet another extremely questionable bullpen non-decision, you didn’t have to remind yourself that on other teams in other clubhouses that manager would have been executed and that pitcher would have been run out of town without the benefit of the proverbial rail.

Last year Nationals general manager Mike Rizzo may have jumped the gun a little too heavily when he ran relief pitcher Shawn Kelley out of town post haste, after a misunderstood mound incident during a blowout in which Kelley, not normally a mop-up man, was sent out to pitch late and surrendered a home run.

Rizzo thought Kelley tried showing up manager Dave Martinez with a gesture that most people including Kelley himself thought was Kelley looking for help with a pair of contradictory umpire instructions. Not to mention slamming his glove to the ground after the home run, as a lot of pitchers do in such situations. Rizzo didn’t even want to hear Kelley’s side of it when confronting the pitcher after the game. The next minute: Kelley was gone.

However wrong Rizzo was in not seeking Kelley’s side of the story, the general message was sent loud and clear: if you’re not with us, you’re out of here. Van Wagenen had far more reason to send that message to Callaway and Vargas and, by extension, to his team, than Rizzo did.

Van Vagenen is no Mike Rizzo. He’s almost equal to the indulgently ignorant parent whose idea of disciplining the child who just put his foot through the neighbour’s glass shower door is to remind the child that the door had no business being in the way of his foot. When Callaway and Vargas put their feet through the shower door glass, Van Wagenen basically told them the door was in the wrong place.

The real trouble is that the Mets’ lack of accountability goes all the way to the owner’s suite. Patriarch Fred Wilpon and his chief operating officer son Jeff keep hitting the snooze button. Van Wagenen’s fiddling while the Mets self-immolate makes Nero resemble Itzhak Perlman and the burning Roman Empire resemble the New York Philharmonic. And the cacophony is deafening.

This year’s Nats have had their hiccups, and second-year manager Martinez hasn’t yet rid himself entirely of the thoughts that he’s in over his head. But just like the Giants, sort of, the Nats two months ago were thought preparing to push the plunger on the season, maybe even putting Max Scherzer, their perennial Cy Young Award candidate, onto the 31 July deadline trading floor.

Just like the Mets, the Nats two months ago had a bullpen with so remarkable tendency to play with matches that there came legitimate fears over whether Sean Doolittle would need Rust-eze rubdowns every other day or night. They also looked rather like the Yankees in that a few too many key parts began spending time on the injured list, too. The M*A*S*Hington Nationals.

When they hit 19-31 at one point this year, even the redoubtable Thomas Boswell couldn’t stop believing Martinez was due for a necktie party. “But just as the Nats have saved their season, so their manager’s prospects have been revived, too,” Boswell wrote a week ago. “I may get my wish: a ‘sincere desire to be proved wrong.’ The Nats players sure think so.”

And lo! The Nats awoke this morning winners of 16 of their last 22. And they’ve danced their way right back to second place in the NL East, a mere five and a half behind the leaders out of Atlanta. It seemed only whipped cream and a cherry on top when Trea Turner hit for his second career cycle Tuesday night against the same Rockies the Giants bastinadoed before finishing off the Mets.

What the proving-to-be-rickety Phillies merely seemed to say they’d do this year, the Nats are doing at last. They’re winning, they’re playing firmly, they’re unapologetic about having a ball doing it, and they even survived the worst of their injuries and loss strings. “This guy understands the grind,” says veteran Nats catcher Kurt Suzuki of Martinez. “He kept us having fun.”

The Mets went to San Francisco riding an unlikely 5-1 string following the All-Star break. After San Francisco, they’re 2-3. Now it might be the Mets looking to sell (particularly pitchers Noah Syndergaard and Zack Wheeler, both of whom seem to have possible suitors for their remaining upsides despite their seasonal struggles) and the Giants looking to hold, or even look for a bargain on the sales floor.

And nobody seemed to know a thing about how the Mets could have kept having fun. The only fun seems to be when Alonso, McNeil, and Dom Smith are at the plate, or when Jacob deGrom is on the mound. And even they’re only human. Not even Hall of Famers can mash every time they swing the bat or strike out every hitter they face.

But the Mets’ issues run too far deeper. Their youthful core in the making, plus their stalwart deGrom, deserve better. Whether they get it is another question. They may only wish they were just the Giants now. Wishing they were the Nats is almost like a school crossing guard wishing he or she were a cop. Except they have better chances of making the wish come true.

Shadows of the Knight: Matt Harvey, now designated for assignment, whose shoulder couldn’t convince his mind he’s not the Dark Knight anymore.

When you hear next of a pitcher taken out of action because of “shoulder fatigue,” your red flags should be waving as violently as if in a stiff wind. The odds are sadly good that it means thoracic outlet syndrome. For a pitcher, the odds are more sadly good that it means career badly compromised and, before very long, over.

And for a pitcher like Matt Harvey, who once looked as though he had a splendid chance of owning baseball, TOS means two seasons since in which he looked like anything but the Dark Knight he once was and still longs very badly to be. Despite his body telling him that it gave up that sword long enough ago.

At least one published report to my knowledge has cited the late Tyler Skaggs telling Harvey not to forget who he was: “You’re still the Dark Knight.” For a 30-year-old pitcher with a body trying to override his mind’s clinging to his past, it was just what Harvey wanted to hear and the last thing he needed to hear.

What Harvey needed most to hear and heed was that he might have rehabilitated his personality away from the New York demimonde to which he once gravitated like the proverbial moth to the flame, but he now had to align his remade self to pitching stuff that wasn’t a Dark Knight’s but could still get major league hitters out, if only he quit trying to pitch like 2013 because his 2019 body couldn’t do that.

And he also needed to hear and heed that his post-TOS surgery body stood a sadly excellent chance of not doing it unless he re-trained it to do it.

It’s entirely possible that either no one told Harvey, or Harvey couldn’t bear to hear, that the pitching prognosis for those undergoing TOS surgery, as he underwent in 2016, is a badly mixed one. But the pitching-challenged Angels, who need innings and lots of them from their starters, finally decided they don’t have time to see whether Harvey can continue re-training his body, his arm, and his pitching mind.

After he surrendered six runs (five earned) in six innings against the Astros during the week, the Angels surrendered, designating Harvey for assignment Friday. They took the flyer based on Harvey looking as though he had something new and developing positively during his spell with the Reds last year, but the Angels could no longer watch Harvey struggle in vain despite the occasional flash of what could be.

In human terms, it’s only too understandable that Harvey couldn’t accept he was no longer the Dark Knight. One minute, he’ll say, “Just have to kind of be smarter out there about what I can and can’t do right now.” But the next, he’ll say, “I tried to throw a 98 mph fastball on the outside corner.” That fastball hit 92 instead. And it was hit over the fence.

Joe and Jane Fan don’t always comprehend the war inside the mind of a baseball player who’d been to the mountaintop several times over—as Harvey was in 65 starts between 2012-2015, as a Met, with a 2.53 ERA over those starts—and has to learn that he may never again be anything like that dominator if he has a major league career left at all.

But if Harvey’s going to defy odds and remain any kind of major league pitcher, he’ll have to find a team in better position than the Angels to give him the chance. He may still have enough stuff to get major league hitters out, but he couldn’t stop taking the mound with the mindset that belonged to a pitcher he can’t be anymore and his command went missing and possibly kidnapped.

Coming off Tommy John surgery is one thing, and Harvey now admits he pushed himself too far, too fast after his recovery and return from that. But coming off TOS surgery—a far more invasive procedure, in which the shoulder is cut through to remove a rib—is something else.

As often as not it begins with “shoulder fatigue.” (Mets pitcher Zack Wheeler, formerly a trade candidate, was shut down with shoulder fatigue when the Mets hoped he’d start against the Twins as a likely trade-deadline showcase.) And, as often as not, it just might mean pitching career over.

If it was bad enough that Harvey pushed himself prematurely returning from Tommy John surgery, doing it in his return from TOS surgery may have been an exercise in futility. He isn’t the first pitcher to whom the condition and corrective surgery spells an end. Not even close. But he’s one of the saddest.

When Jay Jaffe (The Cooperstown Casebook) analysed TOS surgeries and aftermaths last year, after the Twins’ Phil Hughes (post-TOS surgery) was designated for assignment last year, he discovered 29 pitchers having suffered the condition and undergone the surgery with decidedly differing results.

Dodgers pitcher Bill Singer underwent the procedure in 1966 and enjoyed a long enough and solid enough career to follow. Astros pitcher J.R. Richard, a far superior talent, complained of shoulder fatigue in 1980, suffered his infamous stroke, underwent TOS surgery as part of his recovery, but never pitched major league baseball again. And boy, but didn’t he look like he was hitting the Hall of Fame track at last before he was taken down.

Among the 27 who were entered into a table examining their innings before and after the surgery, Jaffe found only five whose ERAs relative to their leagues dipped after the surgery: Aaron Cook, Matt Harrison (who underwent two TOSes, through both shoulders), Clayton Richard, Mike Foltynewicz, and Josh Beckett.

Beckett’s case may have been a little flukish: buffeted with assorted other injuries in the last few years of his career as it was, that righthander and former two-time World Series winner underwent TOS surgery in July 2013 after trying to rehab without it unsuccessfully. Returning in 2014, his velocity remained solid but his command went AWOL. Twenty 2014 starts and a hip injury later, Beckett retired.

Chris Carpenter was another top-of-the-line pitcher whose career went into the dumpster following TOS surgery. Like Beckett, he tried rehabbing without surgery. Until he couldn’t. His September 2012 return was thought miraculous, working seventeen innings that month and thirteen and two-thirds that postseason, but he looked nothing like the pitcher he formerly was. 2013: DL out of spring training, persistent discomfort in two minor league rehab starts, shut down for the season. Career over.

Kenny Rogers was one of the luckier ones. He underwent TOS surgery in 2001, at age 36 and with 2,049.1 innings on his arm. After TOS surgery: he pitched 1253.1 innings, and his ERAs relative to his league remained respectable enough. Not to mention that magnificent performance in the 2006 World Series. Jaffe says Rogers and Aaron Cook (256.1 innings pre-TOS; 1,150 innings post-TOS) are outliers: the median innings before TOS for the pitchers in question was 595 and after, 134.

Harvey before his TOS: 519.2. Harvey since: 306. He was under the median before the surgery and more than double it afterward, but that may be the end of the major league line for him. May. And, among the entire group of post-TOS pitchers Jaffe analysed last year, Harvey has the highest drop in effectiveness even accounting for the improvement he showed in Cincinnati in 2018.

And it’s wise to keep in mind how other injuries might have married to TOS when it comes to reviewing TOS pitchers’ performances pre- and post-TOS. Harvey, Carpenter, Nate Adcock, Carter Capps, Alex Cobb, Jaime Garcia, Luke Hochevar, Shaun Marcum, Vince Velasquez, and Drew VerHagen all underwent Tommy John surgery well before their TOS issues.

Only an extremely small number of the TOS pitchers experienced anything close to the highs Harvey once experienced. The rule, rather than the exception, is pitchers going from such highs to the kind of terrifying lows that now bring Harvey to the crossroads once again.

Call it a flaw in the contemporary baseball mindset if you must, but too many pitchers today still think that unless they’re blowing hitters apart it isn’t pitching. That’s what Dark Knights do. And when they’re not Dark Knights anymore, too many of them refuse to resign themselves. Even while they’re getting killed to death.

Harvey isn’t even close to the only athlete who couldn’t accept that his body went to the enemy side once too often. But is it worth putting up with the uninformed bleating, snarling, and insults from Joe and Jane Fan and a few hundred thousand talking heads to continue denying that your body demands a new way to approach your craft?