McAdam: Task at hand is to ensure Red Sox season doesn't go from bad to worse in next few weeks

The 2019 Red Sox season can already be marked as a huge disappointment. That will happen when you go from a record-setting regular season and a championship one year, to a third-place finish despite the game's biggest payroll the next.

Some players have enjoyed fine individual seasons and others have impressed as rookies. But that doesn't take away the stink of a year in which the Sox are likely to see a reduction of more than 20 wins compared to a season ago.

Expectations were sky-high, and the Red Sox didn't come close to meeting them. That much is inarguable.

But as bad as things have been for the first five-plus months, the Sox may not have hit rock bottom yet.



On Tuesday, they began their next-to-last road trip of the season with a 4-3 loss to the Toronto Blue Jays. That served as their fourth straight loss and the seventh loss in the last 11 tries. They dropped consecutive series at home to the Minnesota Twins and New York Yankees and will need to win the final two games in Toronto to avoid a third straight series loss -- this one to the rebuilding Blue Jays.

Tuesday afternoon in Toronto, Alex Cora, while not completely waving the white flag on the season, acknowledged that he was being "realistic.'' The math is far from encouraging: with 17 games to go, the Red Sox find themselves 8.5 games out of the last wild card spot, their tragic number now down to 11.

In other words, the jig is up. That much has been obvious for the last few weeks, but it becomes more and more unavoidable with each passing day.

As such, Cora said he would be giving some rest to some of the everyday position players. Xander Bogaerts sat Tuesday night and the plan calls for Mookie Betts to be out of the lineup Wednesday and Rafael Devers to get the night off Thursday.

That much makes sense. All three have been remarkably durable. Bogaerts had missed five games before Tuesday and Devers, by the time his day off arrives, will have missed four. Betts has appeared in all but two.

No one would quibble with their commitment or effort, and given the team has all-but-officially eliminated from a wild-card spot, some rest is in order.

But there's a danger that comes with stretches like this. The players know the standings. They know there is no realistic path to the postseason. And they watched president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski get fired over the weekend, the most obvious sign yet that ownership has already moved on from 2019.

In the last 2.5 weeks of the season, the focus will shift to the future. Who will replace Dombrowski? Which free agents will return? Which players might be traded?

And when that kind of speculation begins, it's easy to forget that there are still games to be played. These games won't determine where the Sox finish in the standings -- they're already boxed into third, with second-place Tampa Bay out of reach and fourth-place Toronto sufficiently behind.

Nonetheless, the games remain.

In places like Baltimore, Detroit and Seattle, the games haven't had true consequences for months. But as young teams on the rebuild, many of the young players on those teams are attempting to establish themselves and earn positions for next year.

That's not the case with the Red Sox. With the exception of perhaps first and second base, the positions are already spoken for in 2020.

The danger for the Red Sox is that the relative unimportance attached to the final 17 games.

Already, thanks to an injury-wracked starting rotation, the games are taking on a spring training-like feel, with a half-dozen or more relievers used on a nightly basis. Thanks to the countless pitching changes made nightly, the games drag on longer than usual.

It's easy for the intensity to slip under such circumstances, especially when the Sox play teams out of contention like the Jays, or the San Francisco Giants, Texas Rangers and Orioles awaiting them at the tail end of the schedule.

It will be up to Cora to ensure that the team not lose focus the rest of the way. The respect that he's worked to earn in the clubhouse should come in handy, since his players won't want to embarrass him any further.

In a season that has already gone off the rails, the last thing these Red Sox need is one of those disastrous stretches in the final few weeks, ending the season in miserable fashion, with a dozen or so losses over the final 17 games, riding off into the offseason with a sense of indifference.

The losing streak is at four and counting. For everyone's sake, it had better not stretch on much longer.