McAdam: Red Sox help the Astros to beat themselves

For each of the last three seasons, the Houston Astros have been one of the two or three best teams in the game. Thus, they don't need anyone's help in winning games.

Even still, the Red Sox provided them with plenty in their 4-3 loss at Minute Maid Park.

The Red Sox committed three errors, and two led directly to unearned runs. That spelled the difference between winning and losing for the Sox.

On a night when the Sox allowed just four hits to the best lineup in the league, they should have won. But a failure to field the ball clearly proved problematic.



Sometimes, teams can get away with sloppy play and not have it hurt them. But the Astros are too good, too opportunistic to allow that to happen. They capitalize and make opponents pay for their mistakes.

"You've got to play clean against them,'' Alex Cora told reporters. "They run the bases well and they're very athletic. If we play better defense, we have a chance (to win).''

Two misplays were particularly costly. On the first, first baseman Steve Pearce threw behind Chris Sale as Sale approached the first base bag to take a throw for what should have been the final out of the second inning. The ball wound up behind the plate, chased down by catcher Sandy Leon, who then compounded things when he raced oncoming baserunner Aledmys Diaz to the plate and ended up reaching up the third base line, where he missed the tag.

Had Leon simply planted himself at the plate and allowed Diaz to come to the plate, he likely would have recorded the putout. Instead, the Astros had themselves a gift run.

It was more of the same two innings later. With runners at the corners, Xander Bogaerts charged to his right to field a chopper from Jake Marisnick. But the throw sailed high and wide, allowing Robinson Chirinos to score. Then, again, the problem was compounded when Leon caught Marisnick having taken too big a lead around first, but Michael Chavis and Pearce couldn't execute a rundown properly and Marisnick was able to scamper back to first safely.

The two plays invoked memories of the first couple of weeks, when the Red Sox seemingly couldn't do much of anything right on the field, and whatever mistakes they made were invitations for their opponents to add on. In general, with a few exceptions, the team had cleaned things up defensively over the last month -- coming into Friday's game, they had committed just four errors in the previous 17 games.

But three errors  -- another by Bogaerts in the third proved inconsequential -- proved too much to overcome.

Starter Chris Sale wasn't his dominant self, but once more, deserved a better fate. He allowed just four hits over six innings and of the four runs charged to him, two were, of course unearned.

Naturally, Sale blamed himself for not picking up his teammates after the errors behind him, but that's Sale being magnanimous and a standup teammate.

The sad fact is that, nearly one-third of the way through the season, Sale has made eight starts and the Red Sox have won just two of them. Early on, that was Sale's fault as much as anything, as he wasn't sharp in a few of his early season outings.

But for a team with this much firepower in the lineup, nearly every Sale start could translate to a win. They can't be wasted, and yet, too often, they have been.

The Sox squandered a chance to even the season series with the Astros. Had they won the opener, they would have two shots at winning the series and going home with two straight road series win. Now, they must win two straight to achieve that, a much tougher task.

There were other issues, too. They had starter Wade Miley on the ropes in both the third and fourth innings and came away empty-handed.

The inability to produce a hit in a big spot (0-for-4 with RISP) was symbolic of a night in which the Red Sox failed to do so many little things -- a recipe for defeat when the other team is as good as the Astros.

For all their issues, the Sox scored single runs against Ryan Pressly in the seventh -- the first run he's allowed since last August -- and another against top closer Roberto Osuna in the ninth, bringing the potential tying run to the plate.

But their failures on each side of the ball earlier in the game proved too much to overcome.

"Overall, it wasn't a great game,'' conceded Cora.

That much was obvious