NO RISKS: Red Sox Prepare for Yankees—Can Willson Contreras and Ceddanne Rafaela IMPACT October?

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Forget the final record. The Red Sox have one job this weekend. Get ready for the Yankees.

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What's up, everyone? Welcome into another episode of Locked On Red Sox, your daily Boston Red Sox podcast. I'm your host, Gabby Maljamian, and today's episode is brought to you by Kelshi. For a limited time, download Kelshi and use code LOCKEDON to get $25 when you trade $25. Kelshi, trade what's next. Happy Friday. Welcome to the show. We're officially at that weird part of the baseball season now where the Red Sox still have regular season games to play. But I'm not sure that I care very much whether they win them. And I don't mean that as a negative thing because the Red Sox have already clinched their ticket to the postseason. The Yankees have the top American League wildcard spot. And the Red Sox are sitting in the second spot. Everything's lining up for these two teams to meet at Yankee Stadium beginning on Tuesday night in a best of three wildcard series. So at this point, I don't need the Red Sox emptying the bullpen to win game 159 of the season. I don't need someone playing through something because they want to finish the season with 150 games played. I don't care whether someone ends the year hitting 249 instead of 247. Just get to Tuesday healthy because right now that might be the biggest obstacle between this team and making some noise in October. Unfortunately, there are a few players I'm watching very closely on today's show who can be trusted in the office against the Yankees pitching in the playoffs and just get healthy. Who in the offense can be trusted? That is a big question that I'll talk about later on. But let's start with Sadam Rafaela. Because Wednesday was supposed to be the good news for him. He finally came off the injured list after missing 17 games with the quad strain. Finally getting your all-star center fielder back. And then two innings. That's it. Out of the game with hamstring tightness. And immediately I was thinking, are you freaking kidding me? Like we're really doing this again. Fortunately, Sadon himself didn't sound particularly concerned after the game about it. He said it wasn't even close to being as severe as the quad injury and indicated that it may have simply been a cramp or dehydration. And he was back in the lineup last night, which obviously was encouraging, but I'm still going to say, be careful, proceed with caution. You don't need Sadon proving anything against Cleveland or Chicago. This is a team that's already basically locked into the spot that they're in. If you have Sadon, getting hurt in a series like this against the Guardians or against the Cubs, that would be disappointing because you don't want to lose him for the playoffs just to try to win these games. And obviously you want to get him moving and active because you don't want a guy coming immediately back in the playoffs when they haven't played for a while so getting him