Three weeks remain in the regular season, and the Red Sox are operating on a knife's edge.
The once comfortable advantage they enjoyed in the wild card chase has evaporated. Five teams in the American League are separated by a mere three games.
That makes every game a must-win, every day an opportunity to gain separation from the pack....or fall back into the pack and have to catch up.
None of the teams in the wild card competition are great, and yet none are lousy. Each is flawed, which is why no one has been able to pull away. You could make the argument that there is little to differentiate between the five, which stands to reason, since 140 or more games into the season, they remain as bunched together as a basket full of puppies.
For that matter, it's not just the wild card teams that are so evenly matched. Other than the front-running Tampa Bay Rays, who remain in a class by themselves, there's little difference between the other two division leaders -- the White Sox and the Houston Astros -- and the teams vying for the two wild card spots.
Case in point: the Red Sox and White Sox. When Leury Garcia homered off Garrett Whitlock with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, for a 2-1 walk-off White Sox win, the victory gave the White Sox a slim 4-3 edge in the season series between the clubs. Of the three games this weekend, each was decided by a run, with one game going to extra innings and another being decided in the bottom of the ninth.
Close. Tight. No margin for error.
And that's the way it's going to be over the final 17 games, too, for the Red Sox. Next up is a three-game set in Seattle with the Mariners, who have been making up ground for weeks and have finally entered the matrix of the five-team wildcard scrum.
Those games -- likes the ones just completed at Guaranteed Rate Field -- will be taut, tense and likely to be decided by a mistake or two.
On Sunday, the first White Sox run of the game was unearned, with an error by Kike Hernandez on a grounder hit by Cesar Hernandez to start the inning. It was Cesar Hernandez who moved to second, then scored on a single by Luis Robert.
One mistake, one run scored. On the slimmest of margins are games won in September, and the Sox were living proof of that.
The winning run, meanwhile, scored when Whitlock, pitching on consecutive days for the first time this season, mislocated a pitch. Alex Cora would have preferred to go to someone else in the ninth, with Whitlock having given the Sox two scoreless innings Saturday night and a scoreless eighth the inning prior. Alas, there weren't many options still available.
And here's where the Red Sox roster shortage, caused by the two-week-long COVID breakout, comes into play. Two important high-leverage relievers -- Matt Barnes and Hirokazu Sawamura -- have yet to be activated after spending time on the list. That's resulted in the Red Sox leaning instead on the likes of Hansel Robles in big situations.
Barnes was due to make a rehab appearance for Worcester Sunday, and then another in a day or so before rejoining the parent club Friday when they return from Seattle. But having required eight innings of relief help in Saturday's extra-inning victory and another 4.1 innings Sunday, the bullpen is strapped, and Cora conceded there would be a discussion postgame that could, out of desperation, speed up Barnes' return.
Sawamura, meanwhile, still has some lingering medical protocols to overcome before being cleared to return -- and that's without, to date, a single rehab outing to ease his way back into the bullpen mix.
Even the players who've returned from COVID have to be monitored. Xander Bogaerts was given Sunday off because Cora didn't think it wise to ask him to play three straight games after having been quarantined in a hotel room for more than a week. He also expects to give Bogaerts one of the games off in Seattle.
It's not perfect, of course. The hope would be to attack these final 17 games with a full complement of players, each one of them healthy.
That doesn't seem likely, so the Red Sox make do, hopeful to be a little bit better -- or a little less worse -- that the others jockeying for position, making the final three weeks not just a close race, but a stretch requiring them to dance on a knife's edge.