HOUSTON -- As bad as things were for the Red Sox -- and they were plenty bad -- they were still very much alive in the seventh inning of ALCS Game 6.
Thanks mostly to Nathan Eovaldi, the Red Sox, desperate for a win to extend the series to a winner-take-all Game 7 on Saturday.
Eovaldi allowed a run in the first and another in the sixth while his teammates amassed exactly one (1) hit, extending their offensive futility to just one run in the previous 23 innings.
But almost out of the blue, the Red Sox staged something of a rally in the top of the seventh against Houston reliever Kendall Graveman. With one out, J.D. Martinez worked a walk and when Alex Verdugo ripped a single into the right-field corner, Martinez scurried to third.
It marked the first time that the Sox had had multiple baserunners at the same time in the same inning since the fifth inning of Game 5.
Recognizing Graveman's dominance of right-handed hitters -- they hit just .117 against him in the regular season and slugged only .126 -- Alex Cora called on lefty Travis Shaw to hit for Christian Arroyo.
Shaw worked the count full, at which point Verdugo bolted for second base.
Uh oh.
Shaw swung through a 95 mph four-seamer than couldn't have been any more center-cut, and Verdugo, who had a poor secondary lead, was gunned down at second base by a seed from the right arm of Houston catcher Martin Maldonado.
In an instance, the Red Sox went from threatening, with the potential tying run on base, to out of the inning, and effectively out of hope. A strike-'em-out-throw-'em-out double play not only killed any momentum they had been building, it basically sealed their fate for the series.
Two innings later, their season was over.
"I just bet on my players,'' explained Cora. "Three-two count, (if) we put the ball in play against a sinker-baller, we score one. (Maldonado) threw like a 1.4 to second, and we didn't make contact and (Verdugo) got thrown out. We were trying to score one and we felt like we had the right guy to first. It just mattered that their catcher came out shooting and he made a perfect throw.''
In one sense, Cora's aggressive call was understandable. It wasn't as if anything else was working for his team in the previous two games and the first six innings of Game 6 had produced one hit. Why not take a chance?
But the move also reeked of desperation. Maldonado has one of the strongest throwing arms of any catcher in the American League and while Verdugo was 6-for-8 in stolen base tries during the season, he isn't known as an artful or experienced base stealer, On the attempt, he had a poor secondary lead, making the task at hand that much more difficult.
The double play seemed to sink the Red Sox emotionally, and a three-run homer by Kyle Tucker off Adam Ottavino in the bottom of the eighth made it official.
Meanwhile, the Red Sox never again so much as put a runner on base. They went down meekly in the eighth and ninth, six up and six down, their morale sapped, their spirit non-existent.
All that was left was the final out to make the Astros' coronation as American League champs official.
"It's really tough, obviously,'' allowed Kike Hernandez. "Going home is never easy. We felt like, once we got to this point, the goal was to win the World Series and we thought we were going to do it and obviously we came up short. Sometimes you've just got to tip your hat to the other team.''
And sometimes, you feel you have to force the issue. The last desperate measure played out in the seventh inning. Like most everything else the Red Sox tried offensively since Game 3, it too failed.
When that doesn't work, you're out of both options and time.