In the span of the last two games, the Red Sox lineup has been temporarily exposed. It's painfully obvious that when the team doesn't get any production from its three biggest hitters, the offense is toothless.
In reality, that's probably true of most every lineup in Major League Baseball. Most clubs are dependent on the middle of their batting order, and when those bats cool, as they invariably do over the course of the season, the offense stalls.
But the Red Sox haven't just stalled through two games of a four-game set at Minute Maid Park; they've disappeared.
Through two games, they've registered just 10 hits and three runs. But the perfunctory manner in which they've been set down has to be at least a little alarming to Red Sox management. In exactly nine of the 18 innings against the Astros, the Sox have been retired 1-2-3; in six others, the Sox have sent just four men to the plate.
No rallies, no making the opposing pitcher work, no pushback.
And, it should follow, no wins.
The team's 3-4-5 hitters -- J.D. Martinez, Xander Bogaerts and Rafael Devers -- are a combined 0-for-21 with 12 strikeouts. Worse, they've combined for one walk, an indication they're not being selective at all. To the contrary, knowing that as they go, so goes the team, the three look to be pressing.
And it's not as if the collective slump just started when the Sox touched down in Texas Sunday night. Bogaerts is without a hit in his last 18 at-bats, while Devers has been susceptible to fastballs for weeks now, a weakness which the Astros successfully exploited by throwing him 30 fastballs in a row.
That sort of one-dimensional approach to a major league hitter -- especially once as successful as Devers has been -- would seem unthinkable. But the Astros have the same access to the third baseman's struggles as everyone else and surely were well aware that began the night hitting .165 against fastballs this season.
At this point, the fact that Devers also began the night with a .946 OPS for the season is all the more impressive, considering he's apparently done almost all of his damage exclusively on breaking pitches and off-speed offerings. Imagine what that number would look like if he had been doing damage on heaters, too.
For much of the season, of course, the trio of Martinez-Bogaerts-Devers has carried the team. With the exception of Hunter Renfroe, whose turnaround began about a month ago, the Sox have gotten virtually nothing from the bottom half of their lineup. There have been contributions from Alex Verdugo at times, and occasionally Kiké Hernandez. But in reality, the Sox are a byproduct of their Big Three.
(Hernandez, too, has nosedived at the plate of late, going 0-for-20. His struggles would be more worrisome if his inability to get on base were costing Martinez, Bogaerts and Devers come RBI opportunities. But since they're not doing anything anyway. Hernandez's struggles are almost inconsequential.)
None of which means that the Red Sox should be exhibiting panic. Slumps are to be expected at some point.
"They're human...that's part of it,'' shrugged Alex Cora. "(Slumps) are going to be part of 162 games. That's why we always talk about how the other guys have to step up. (The three) aren't going to carry the offense for 162 games. We're going to run through stuff like this -- (facing) two guys who have good stuff and have a good game plan. We're going to run into this, probably, this month with everybody that we face.
"So we've got to make adjustments. We've done it before. We've just got to keep working with them and the other guys have to step up.''
The former is a given. The latter isn't exactly encouraging.
The Red Sox are where they are because their starting pitching has given them a chance in about 90 percent of their games -- Garrett Richards did so over six innings Tuesday night -- and their three most potent offensive weapons each went into Tuesday with an OPS that began with 9.
Now that the inevitable cooldown has taken place, finding other ways to score runs is a challenge. The rest of the lineup strikes out too much and walks too infrequently, making the prospect of building a big inning all the more problematic. And with the exception of Renfroe, they don't have a lot of other power threats. Of the team's 69 homers, more than half (36) come from The Big Three.
They could try to win low-scoring games until Martinez, Bogaerts and Devers fix things, but that strategy is far more likely to be successful against the likes of the Mets rather than the Astros and Yankees, who are their opponents in eight of the next nine games.
The notion of sitting and waiting until the three start to deliver seems quaint -- until you realize, however unwittingly, that's been their approach all season.