It's early enough in the season that almost all of the games are still fresh in the memory, still retrievable from the memory bank before too many deposits get made, and by July or so, they all start to run together.
There have been only eight Red Sox losses in the first three weeks of the season, so that doesn't make for a lot of mental gymnastics.
That's why it's easy to catalog the 7-3 setback to the Seattle Mariners as unquestionably the worst of the 2021 season to date.
No questions asked. No doubts incurred.
Worst.
Sure, there was the third game of the season when Garrett Richards was all over the place and Josh Taylor wasn't any better. That was embarrassing, but at least it declared itself by the third inning.
Thursday was different, for a multitude of reasons:
- It marked the first time the Red Sox had held a lead at some point (in this case, from the first through the fifth and again from the seventh into the eighth) and still lost.
- It marked the first time they lost in extra innings.
- And most notably, without any qualifiers, it was a game they had no business losing.