Kutter Crawford went into the All-Star break on a high. He’d pitched back-to-back shutout starts of seven innings apiece against the formidable Yankees (in New York) and Kansas City Royals.

But in each of his first four starts coming out of the All-Star break, he allowed five or six earned runs. He gave up a grand total of 13 home runs, including at least three homers in three of his outings. Twice, he’d failed to reach five full innings.

On Tuesday night, he took a perfect game into the sixth inning. That, combined with nine runs from the Boston bats, culminated in a 9-4 victory and series win over the Texas Rangers.

“He threw the ball well, extremely well,” said manager Alex Cora. “I think the four-seamer played better than the last three or four (starts). Command was a lot better. He was on the attack, very efficient. Gave us a chance to win.”

After one of the previous four starts, Crawford spoke about the need to throw more “quality strikes.” In the first inning on Tuesday, he threw nine pitches, eight for strikes. His manager saw the four-seamer as the difference.

“He was able to elevate. He had velo, he had life, and I think that was the separator,” Cora said.

When all was said and done, he’d pitched 5.1 innings and allowed four earned runs on three hits, one walk, and struck out four.

But when the perfecto bid ended, the frame went downhill hard and fast. David Hamilton made a nifty throw to first for the first out, but it would be the last of Crawford’s outing. He gave up back-to-back singles to catcher Carson Kelly and center fielder Leody Taveras, and leadoff man Marcus Semien got Texas on the board with a double. When Crawford walked Corey Seager to load the bases, Cora called for reinforcements, despite his starting pitcher only being at 67 pitches.

“They’re good hitters,” Cora said. “We’re gonna be aggressive. We’re gonna use everybody, and we’re going to try to get 27 outs however we can to win games.

“We’re in the middle of a playoff chase or whatever you want to call it,” Cora continued. “If I feel like that’s the moment of the game, that’s the moment of the game. Sometimes it’s gonna work, sometimes it not gonna work, but it’s not going to be for lack of aggressiveness. If I feel they’re throwing the ball well, we’ll keep rolling with them. If I feel like the matchups benefit the bullpen, we’ll go to the bullpen.”

The Rangers didn’t let Cam Booser record an out, either. The bases remained juiced as he faced the minimum three batters required; Josh Smith greeted him with an RBI single, and Booser issued back-back-to-back bases-loaded walks to force in two more. All four runs were charged to Crawford.

For the second time in the inning, Cora had to make a pitching change with one out and nowhere to put a batter. He called for Lucas Sims, who got Josh Jung to line out, and Wyatt Langford, who’d led off that inning, to strike out looking to strand a full diamond. It was a huge moment for the trade deadline acquisition.

“Eh, he hung a slider to (Jose) Altuve,” Cora said of Sims’ rough outing over the weekend. “He’s thrown the ball well. Good cutter, good slider, good four-seamer. … He gave us more than enough (tonight).”

Crisis averted for the home team. The visitors, however, immediately lost their manager; Bruce Bochy argued the called strike 3 – which was slightly outside the zone – and was ejected at the start of the bottom of the inning.

The Boston bats had failed to capitalize on several opportunities throughout Monday’s series opener, and only won in the 10th inning on Rob Refsnyder’s walk-off hit. On Tuesday night, they tallied 12 hits, including three doubles and a homer, drew a pair of walks, and only struck out seven times, after too many double-digit punchout games in recent weeks.

The offensive showing included a pair of moments loaded with symbolism. After Masataka Yoshida became the game’s first baserunner when Rangers starter Jose Ureña hit him with the first pitch, Rafael Devers got Boston on the board with an RBI double off the Green Monster. His 627th career RBI tied Ted Williams for the second most by a Red Sox player before turning 28. Devers has a chance to tie or break Jim Rice’s record of 669; he doesn’t turn 28 until the end of October.

The Red Sox put up five runs in the fifth inning and knocked Ureña out of the game. The kill shot was Connor Wong’s three-run homer. With former Red Sox catcher Carlton Fisk looking on from the Legends’ Suite, the current backstop blasted one to the left corner of the Green Monster seats, just fair inside the Fisk Pole to extend Boston’s lead.

The Red Sox tacked on another three runs in the eighth, and Kenley Jansen’s four-out closing performance put the game to bed. After losing four in a row, including a three-game sweep by the Houston Astros over the weekend, this series win was the “reset” Cora said his team needed.

The Red Sox and Rangers play their series finale on Wednesday at 6:05 p.m. Barring a postseason meeting, they won’t see each other again until Opening Day 2025.

Originally Published: August 13, 2024 at 11:20 p.m.

A Bluebikes station is coming to a street near you, Mayor Michelle Wu says.

The mayor announced a new citywide plan to install 100 new Bluebikes stations across every neighborhood in Boston on Monday. The planned expansion will meet rising demand and increase reliability of the bike share system, the city’s Streets Cabinet said in a statement.

The city will execute the plan in phases, the statement said. The first phase, planned for this fall, will add stations in Beacon Hill, Chinatown, Downtown, North End, South End, Wharf District, and the West End. The second phase involves installing bike share stations in Charlestown, East Boston, South Boston, and the Seaport.

“Investing in our regional bike share program is a key component to Boston reaching its transportation goals,” said Jascha Franklin-Hodge, Chief of Streets for the City of Boston. “We are focused on improving the reliability of Bluebikes and ensuring residents have easy access to bike share in every neighborhood.”

Bluebikes announced they would offer free rides to commuters during the Red Line shutdown last month. The BlueBike initiative originally launched in 2011 with just 600 bikes. Now, the city says there are 450 stations and 4,000 bikes across Greater Boston. 

“Traffic might be the biggest headache that you have to deal with every single day,” Boston Mayor Michelle Wu told reporters last Thursday, touting Google’s technological promise to target small traffic hotspots. “We know that even small tweaks can go a long way.”

Project Green Light uses AI and Google Maps’ driving trends to model traffic patterns and also make signal timing recommendations for city traffic engineers to implement, according to the company’s website. For the past five months, the Google team has been analyzing traffic at hundreds of intersections around Boston and providing suggestions for optimizing traffic signals and patterns to minimize time stopped unnecessarily at red lights.

While transportation planners warn that Google’s technology is not a panacea, the technology offers the promise to quickly, albeit often modestly, reduce preventable traffic snarls.

Since the partnership began, Boston has already implemented Google’s suggestions by changing signal timing at intersections in Fenway-Kenmore, Mission Hill, and Jamaica Plain. Once the changes are made, such as keeping a light green in one direction for longer, the Green Light team then analyzes the resulting impact on traffic and provides the city with that data.

Intersections where changes have been made have quickly seen improvements.

At Huntington Ave. & Opera Place and at Amory Street & Green Street, “stop-and-go traffic has been reduced by over 50 percent,” according to the city. Wu touted the statistics as well, saying that the use of the technology to combat congestion “is one piece of something that we know to be a bigger part of the solution.”

In some cases, she added, that solution can be quite simple. “Sometimes it’s just a matter of how long a particular light stays green going one direction in the intersection versus the cross street,” Wu said.

Worldwide, 13 other cities on four continents are using it, including Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, Manchester in England, and Hamburg in Germany. Google is not currently charging its partner cities to use Green Light, and the program does not require cities to purchase hardware.

Early numbers from Google’s analysis of traffic patterns before and after recommended changes were made to traffic signals during tests conducted in 2022 and 2023 indicate a “potential for up to 30 percent reduction in stops,” according to the company. Google says cities using the technology have also seen, on average, a 10 percent reduction in tailpipe emissions at intersections.

While the city’s transportation department continuously monitors traffic with cameras at intersections, enabling it to respond when traffic snags arise, Wu said manual adjustments can’t fully address the big-picture problem.

“In order for us to really think about traffic and fixing it across the entire city, we can’t just go like by light by light and do it,” she said. With the data from Google, “we can then go in and really have a tailored approach … in a much more effective way.”

The technology can be “incredibly effective,” said Stacy Thompson, the executive director of LivableStreets Alliance, a transit advocacy group based in Cambridge.

At intersections where traffic patterns are changing throughout the day, the traffic lights can be taught “how to respond in more real-time,” she said. Or, she added, the technology can help often backed-up intersections cycle traffic through faster.

But it is not a “one-size-fits-all solution” for tackling congestion, Thompson stressed. Problems arise when the technology only focuses on cars, and intersections in the city need to “work for everyone,” including bikers and pedestrians, she said.

“I would actually love to see an expansion of this program that includes things like queue jumps [when a bus gets priority at an intersection] … things that really are also monitoring pedestrian flow,” Thompson said. “And, of course, optimization for the increasing number of bike lanes and bike signals.”

“All need to fit under this smart signals technology,” said Thompson, who added that the city should be transparent about where and how it is using the technology.

Ultimately, these are the goals, said Michael Lawrence Evans, Boston’s director of emerging technology. But some of that technology does not yet exist, and true adaptive signaling is expensive and requires a lot of hardware and maintenance.

“A platform like Green Light was a pretty low barrier way for us to try more frequent signal timing changes based on fresh data,” he said.

Having that new data “to validate the impact of the interventions is really helpful,” said Santi Garces, Boston’s chief innovation officer, but such tools are “not substitutes for this comprehensive policy approach to building better roads.”

Wu also acknowledged that the AI-powered experiment will not solve Boston’s traffic issues.

Her administration has prioritized making buses more reliable, reducing congestion by ramping up enforcement of double parking, and improving street safety and access, such as by expanding the city’s bike lane network. Artificial intelligence is one more part of the arsenal. The big-picture focus is “on trying to make sure that this is as convenient as possible to get around,” Wu said.

Shannon Larson can be reached at shannon.larson@globe.com. Follow her @shannonlarson98.