BOSTON — The Red Sox have been frequent visitors to rock bottom this season. Monday’s 13-5 trouncing by the Astros ranked among the worst of such moments. A second straight loss to the Astros on Tuesday, this time by a score of 6-2, was marginally better in terms of saving face but just as bad in the standings.
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Time and again they’ve found ways to rise again and gain ground; this time it feels less likely. The days are running out and the wild-card deficit is growing. The Red Sox are now 6.5 games back for the third wild-card spot with 29 games remaining.
Even the brightest spot in the rotation this season, Brayan Bello, failed to reach five innings on Tuesday, something he’s done just three times since June. Another display of poor defense behind Bello — notably, errant throws from Rafael Devers and David Hamilton — drove up his pitch count and forced him out early.
Bello allowed three runs, two earned, in 4 ⅔ innings. A lifeless Red Sox offense had chances to bail him out, but showed little outside of Adam Duvall hitting his seventh homer in his last nine games. The lineup went 0-for-6 with runners in scoring position and left eight on base.
“We just have to play better baseball,” manager Alex Cora said. “We haven’t done that. We are where we are because we’ve struggled in certain areas of the game and it’s catching up now.”
For much of July, the Red Sox subsisted on openers and a strong, cohesive bullpen. Their injured starters returned this past month, accompanied by the hope that they would fortify the club; it’s had the opposite effect. The Red Sox have gotten worse. Cora has had to manage the workload of Chris Sale, Tanner Houck and even starter-turned-reliever Garrett Whitlock, leading to shorter outings and more stress on the pen.
The team used an opener three times in 27 games since the start of August. In the other 24 games, their starting pitcher threw fewer than five innings 11 times, including in each of the last four games.
“At the end of the day, it’s not the bullpen, it’s the starters,” Cora said before the game in rehashing a brutal loss on Monday, one that saw a short start from Sale and exposed a beleaguered bullpen that left Kyle Barraclough hung out to dry. “If you look around the league, the teams that are dominating, their starters are going six or seven.”
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Cora was quick to clarify his comments were not directed at the roster constructed by the front office, especially when asked about his relationship with chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom.
“I think our relationship is a good one,” he said. “Over the course of 162, the roster is not the same every single day. There’s days that the roster is full, everybody’s healthy, everybody’s rested. There’s others that you only have three pitchers available.”
When pressed about a desire to add more pitching at the deadline to mitigate the risk, Cora remained resolute.
“We felt like with Chris and Whit and Tanner coming back, we were gonna be fine,” he said. “It just hasn’t happened. Tanner has thrown the ball well, but he hasn’t gone deeper into the game.”
Cora heard the noise surrounding the Barraclough incident on Monday and felt the need to explain further how taxed his bullpen has been amidst a stretch of playing 32 games in 34 days.
“It doesn’t matter how many pitches. People have this misconception that 20 pitches is only 20 pitches. It’s the value of the pitch,” he said, noting the stressful innings of late. “It’s not easy because you’re trying to win. And this is a team that we’re chasing, but (Monday) at that point, that’s what we needed to do. We had two plans: Sale, Barraclough, Chris Martin, Kenley Jansen, or Sale then Barraclough. That’s it. And it didn’t happen the way we wanted it to.”
It didn’t happen the way they wanted on Tuesday either.
Making Tuesday even worse, Cora also revealed before the game that Jarren Duran, a spark plug for much of the season, is headed for season-ending surgery on his toe. Duran injured the toe while climbing the wall at Yankee Stadium on a Gleyber Torres home run 10 days ago. The Red Sox expect Duran to be ready for spring training.
Duran hit .295 with an .898 OPS and 24 steals in 102 games this season while showing much-improved defense in center. Even though Duran cooled off after the break, hitting .238 with a .696 OPS, Cora was impressed with his season.
“He went through the ups and downs,” Cora said. “He was hot, then he struggled, but he had a good season, a really good season.
“This is a guy we’re counting on in the future, but he’ll bounce back.”
The question remains: Will the Red Sox?
(Top photo of Bello: Brian Fluharty / Getty Images)
