COMMENTARY
It can be a dangerous game to encapsulate 162-plus bouts of baseball into a single nine-inning contest.
Nor is it always a fruitful exercise to make any sweeping conclusions about the state of a franchise off of what transpires in a winner-take-all showdown in October.
Not when the fate of a season can sometimes come down to a bloop, blast, or a bobble in the outfield.
For Alex Cora’s club on Thursday night, it was a freight train rolling out of Route 1 in Walpole product Cam Schlittler that sealed their fate.