Red Sox pitcher honors late mother on emotional Mother's Day start

Payton Tolle climbed the Fenway Park mound on Mother’s Day carrying a tribute as visible as his pink socks and as private as the loss behind them. The 23-year-old Boston Red Sox left-hander was pitching two years and one day after his mother, Jina Tolle, died on May 9, 2024, after nearly eight years of battling colon cancer.

Tolle wore his pant legs high enough to show the socks, a small but deliberate gesture for a day that had been weighing on him for weeks. Rain pushed his scheduled start back a day, and the delay left him more time to sit with the emotion of it. He said the weekend had been difficult and added, “This week is really tough for me.”

Before the game, Tolle shared a photo of his mother on Instagram, and players throughout the Red Sox organization responded to it. He had also been saving a song for the specific moment, another sign that he was trying to turn a painful anniversary into something directed toward memory rather than absence.

The baseball part of the afternoon was less kind. Tolle entered with a 2.04 ERA but allowed three earned runs on seven hits in five innings, striking out four as Boston fell to the Tampa Bay Rays, 4-1. Afterward, Tolle summed up the matchup bluntly: “They had a plan and they stuck to it and beat me.”

The loss left Boston at 17-23 and extended a frustrating stretch in which the club had dropped three of its last four series by two games to one. Tampa Bay moved to 26-13, continuing its strong start. Interim manager Chad Tracy said the start carried special meaning for Tolle, while catcher Mickey Gasper said he could not imagine what it was like to take the rubber on a day like that and said he was proud of how Tolle handled it.

Mother’s Day has long carried a different kind of weight at Fenway Park. Boston entered Sunday 17-8 on the holiday since 2000, and the standard still looms from May 10, 2007, when the Red Sox erased a 5-0 deficit with six runs in the ninth in the Mother’s Day Miracle. Tolle’s start did not join that list for the scoreboard, but it fit the larger Boston tradition of public baseball absorbing private memory and making room for both.