Gavin Sheets made the declaration.
“This isn’t over,” he said. “It’s not over. We have too much talent to lay [down].”
Eloy Jimenez, itching to come back from an appendectomy to aid the cause, concurred.
“How many games are left?” Jimenez asked.
One hundred eighteen is the answer, following the Sox’ 7-2 win against the Guardians Wednesday at Guaranteed Rate Field.
That should be enough to make up eight games, the distance between the Sox and the first-place Twins in the vulnerable AL Central.
“It’s not late,” Jimenez said. “A hundred and something games. When we come back ... we can be in first place.”
The 16-28 Sox have nowhere to ride but the optimism highway. The Twins are four games over .500.
“We got some big matchups these next two weeks,” Sheets said, alluding to 11 more games in a row against the Guardians, Royals and Tigers of the division. “We can still make a statement and have a great May and take it into June and see what happens. This isn’t over.”
Needing to close the gap on the defending champion Guardians and eyeing a possible series sweep, the Sox took the second game of an important three-game series behind the home run power of Sheets, Andrew Vaughn and Jake Burger. Former Guardian Mike Clevinger pitched six-plus innings of two-run ball.
Sheets clubbed his second homer in two nights, a 413-foot game tying shot to center in the second against Guardians righty Peyton Battenfield. It was Sheets’ sixth of the season.
Vaughn led off the fourth with his fifth homer, and the free-swinging Burger poked his 10th of the season three batters later, a two-run shot scoring Yasmani Grandal. Burger also tripled in the eighth inning.
Burger’s home run swing was his 23rd straight hack without a take. In that stretch, Burger was 6-for-10 with three homers.
Andrew Benintendi doubled in the fifth and scored on Yoan Moncada’s single to give the Sox a 5-1 lead. The Sox plated two runs in the sixth, one on Tim Anderson’s RBI single.
In the sixth, however, catcher Yasmani Grandal appeared to aggravate a troublesome hamstring when he singled in the sixth and came out for pinch runner Adam Haseley.
The Guardians, playing the series without All-Star third baseman Jose Ramirez (bereavement list) and Josh Naylor (leg soreness), fell to 19-22, four games ahead of the Sox.
Clevinger (six innings, six hits, two runs, five strikeouts) loaded the bases with no outs in the seventh before getting pulled in favor of Reynaldo Lopez, who walked in a run.
In the first game of the series Tuesday, an 8-3 win, the Sox got a strong start from Lance Lynn and homers from Sheets and Luis Robert Jr., who homered in his fourth consecutive game. It came off series losses to the last-place Royals and defending World Series champion Astros.
“It reminds us how good we can be,” manager Pedro Grifol said before Wednesday’s game. “Other than that, we played a good baseball game, we pitched well, we hit well. We’ve got to get ready to do it again tonight. The beauty about this game is whether you put a game like that together or not, you still have to come back the next day and do it again.”
The Sox need momentum, any kind, desperately. They have one three-game winning streak and were trying to win two in a row for the second time all year.
“Whether you put a good game together or you put a bad one together, you’ve got to flush it and go to the next day,” Grifol said. “Hopefully we can build some momentum and carry it on for some time.
“We’re capable of doing that on a consistent basis. Just reminds us, hey, we’re pretty good. We’ve got to stay focused, stay the course and we’ve got to continue to play hard and work hard.”