I've been watching baseball for the better part of five decades, and there's a kind of losing that feels permanent. You know the look. Heads down in the dugout, bullpen leaking runs every night, the body language of a team that's already packed it in. The Boston Red Sox had that look in April. Maybe even into May.

They don't have it anymore.

According to this breakdown, the Red Sox have clawed their way from the basement of the American League East into genuine contention, and the numbers behind the flip are something else. We're talking about a team that looked dead on arrival through the first six weeks and now plays like a club that intends to be playing in October.

Take a look at a couple of historical examples. The 1995 Seattle Mariners were 13 games under .500 in late May and roared back to win the AL West in that strike-shortened season. The 2019 Washington Nationals were 19-31 and ended up hoisting a trophy. Comebacks happen. But they don't happen by accident, and they don't happen because a team just starts "trying harder." Something clicks mechanically, tactically, or with personnel, and the wins start stacking.

For these Red Sox the turnaround has been built on the kind of boring, repeatable fundamentals that win games in August and September. Better starting pitching. A bullpen that stopped turning every late-inning lead into a white-knuckle experience. And an offense that figured out how to string together professional at-bats instead of swinging for the fences every pitch like a beer league softball team playing under the lights on a Thursday.

The AL East is a meat grinder and it has been for years. You don't get to quietly sneak up the standings in that division. Every game is a street fight with the Yankees, Rays, Blue Jays, and Orioles, all of whom have enough talent to make a run of their own. Boston didn't just stop losing. They started beating good teams, and that's the part that tells you this might be real.

Dave Morgan over on our desk would probably point you to the underlying metrics, the expected FIP, the hard-hit rates, all of it. And he'd be right to. The numbers do support what's happening. But numbers don't capture the feel of a clubhouse that went from funereal to electric, and that matters more than people who never played the game want to admit.

The schedule doesn't get easier from here. It never does in the East. But what the Red Sox have done, going from an afterthought to a team nobody wants to face right now, is one of the better stories of this season. I've been doing this long enough to know you don't crown a team in August. I also know what a dead team looks like, and Boston hasn't been that team for a while now.