Hours before the start of their second-to-last series of the season, Alex Cora was asked if he worried about his team being complacent about the task at hand: to wit, three games with the ghastly Baltimore Orioles, owners of 106 losses, including 12 already at the hands of the Sox themselves, most recently swept at Fenway after allowing 24 runs in the three games
Cora insisted that wouldn't be the case, and pointedly noted the Sox wouldn't be fighting for their playoff lives if they had done a better job in the opening series of the season, when they were ignominiously swept by the Orioles at Fenway.
Presumably Cora knows how to take his team's temperature, so let's take him at his word. Over-confidence wasn't the reason behind their 4-2 loss to the Orioles at Camden Yards, the club's fourth straight setback, dropping them two full games behind the Yankees in the wild card chase.
OK. How about the lack of adrenaline and atmosphere? Camden Yards, ordinarily packed for Red Sox visits, had a little over 8,000 fans in attendance. That stood in stark contrast to the recent weekend series with the Yankees, played before three straight sellout crowds at Fenway, with plenty of noise supplied in each of the three games.
Was that the reason the Sox seemed so uninspired?
"Better not be,'' seethed losing pitcher Chris Sale, "because we've got two more against them and we need both of them.''
For their own sake, they need them all the rest of the way, but Tuesday night was not a good start. In dropping the opener against the Orioles, the Sox managed just three hits the entire night. Two of them -- one by Kyle Schwarber, another by Hunter Renfroe -- left the ballpark. The other one never left the infield.
After Renfroe's homer to lead off the sixth, the last dozen Boston hitters of the game were retired by the Orioles' bullpen. They didn't come close to a hit until J.D Martinez squared up a ball with two outs in the ninth, only to have left fielder Ryan McKenna fully extend his glove hand and haul it in right in front of the left field wall for the game's final out.
But it was worse than that. In the eighth inning, the Red Sox had barely returned to the dugout when it was time to go back in the field, managing to make three outs on four pitches.
"Offensively, we didn't do much,'' said Cora. "There were a lot of empty at-bats. We didn't put pressure on them. We're an offensive team and we're a lot better than what we showed today. A lot of quick outs. There were only a few at-bats that we grinded out and we got into deep counts. But like I said, there were a lot of quick outs and we need to be better offensively.''
Cora was asked if he thought his hitters were succumbing to the pressures of the playoff race, and in turn, trying to do too much with their at-bats.
"Like I said, there were some quick outs,'' Cora said. "Obviously, we like to swing the bat. But at the same time...obviously, we do a better job when there's a lot of traffic and tonight, we didn't do that.''
In point of fact, the Red Sox did not have a single inning in which they had more than one baserunner. And you can't say they didn't have a good approach with runners in scoring position because.....they never had a single at-bat with a runner in scoring position all night.
That's hard to do. In Camden Yards, against this Baltimore pitching staff, it seems full-on impossible.
Have the Red Sox convinced themselves that, given the quality of opponents they're facing in the season's final week that they can just show up and run the table. If so, Tuesday represented a rude awakening.
A playoff spot is there to be won, but time is running short.
"These games, they're not making any more of them and we're getting towards the end,'' said Sale. "We know where we're at. We know what we're up against. And it's not even us vs. anybody. It's us vs. us. We've got to win games. The (sooner) we can get back to that, the better off we're going to be.''
And shame on them if they're taking these last handful of games for granted.