McAdam: Postseason (again) reveals some uncomfortable truths about Red Sox

There was fight, yes, and for a time Monday in the middle innings, with Chris Sale chewing up the Houston Astros and spitting them out, there was reason to believe that, late start and all, these Red Sox were going to push things back to Houston.

Then, there would be tales of 0-2 comebacks in 1999 and 2003, and the Astros would have to answer lots of question, the first of which might have been: Is this going to be like 2015 all over again, when you allowed Kansas City to come back and steal the ALDS?

But hope began to wash away in the eighth. Sale, nearly perfect through his first four innings, surrendered a homer and the lead. Craig Kimbrel, who replaced him, couldn’t maintain the tie, then made things worse with another run allowed in the ninth.

An inside-the-park homer by Rafael Devers in the bottom of the ninth electrified the ballpark for one last time in 2017, but it proved to be little more than a going-away present, a parting gift for the season that wasn’t.

In a predictably downcast clubhouse, the Red Sox seemed somehow stuck in between celebrating their mettle in the last two games and acknowledging that they weren’t good enough.

“Obviously, every team’s goal is to go as far as you can in the playoffs and win the World Series,’’ said Kimbrel, who allowed an inherited runner to score in the eighth, then allowed a run entirely of his own doing in the ninth. “Any time you get knocked out, you always go back (and ask), 'What could I do (differently)? Did I do this? Did I do that?’

“I felt like this ballclub, we got two games down and we came back (Sunday) and fought hard and came back today and fought hard. In games, that’s all you can really ask your team for – to go out there and give everything they had.’’

If we’re grading, that’s an ‘A’ for effort, but an ‘F’ for execution. And frankly, effort is the lowest of expectations to meet.

If one win in a best-of-five series is supposed to represent progress over a year ago – when they were ignominiously swept aside in three-straight by the Indians – then perhaps the standards have slipped. Not only weren’t the 2017 Red Sox good enough to make a long run into October – for the second year in a row, they barely got out of the starter’s gate.

Something is amiss. The same team which the last two seasons in a row captured first in a highly competitive division somehow seems to shrivel in the postseason. Is it talent? Leadership? Some other intangible?

“(I think we’re) very close,’’ said Dustin Pedroia, when asked how close the Sox are to being where they want to be. “A couple of balls here and there, that’s it. The team that beat us won 101 games and we were right there with them. We fought to the last out. It’s just part of it, but it’s the part that hurts the most.

“You work so hard together and go through so much, and to come up short, it hurts.’’

Billy Beane has long said it’s dangerous to read too much into postseason performance because the results carry a degree of randomness. And he’s right. Go back to 2004, and if Dave Roberts is a millisecond slower and tagged out, the comeback doesn’t happen. That’s a perfect – and locally, the most obvious – example of how from small things, sometimes big things come.

A three-game losing streak in June or July barely merits notice, while a three-game losing streak in October can end a season.

But that’s the point of the postseason, to separate the great from the merely good. And for two straight Octobers, the Red Sox have come up woefully short.

When you stare at the inability of the team’s core to produce in the postseason, does that suggest they’re not good enough, or only that they picked a bad time to underperform?

Over the last two post-seasons, Xander Bogaerts hit .138, Jackie Bradley Jr. hit .160 and Mookie Betts hit .269. As all three build service time, does their lack of production in the playoffs suggest their far better numbers in the regular season are somehow fraudulent, or at least misleading? Does it make the Red Sox think twice about trying to extend one or all of them?

And what of the vaunted Red Sox rotation, which was good enough to finish with the fourth-best ERA (4.06) in the league, just a shade behind the No. 3 Astros (4.03) and No. 2 Yankees (3.98), but somehow never recorded a single one-two-three inning in the postseason and posted a ghastly 12.70 ERA while managing 11.1 innings pitched in four games?

The same applies to Kimbrel, who appeared otherworldly over six months, but was substandard in Game 4 when only the season was on the line.

“We just weren’t good enough,’’ concluded Pedroia, an obvious enough point to anyone who watched over the last week.

Now comes the hard part: What to do about it?