Three losses in five games. Four in six. Eight in 12.
Whichever way you slice it, the losses are adding up. And they’re coming at the absolute worst time for these Boston Red Sox.
A third of those losses during that 12-game span have come to the Astros following a 5-4 walk-off loss Monday night in Houston to open a three-game series.
“You’re going to go through stretches like this, you’re gonna win some, you’re gonna lose some,” Alex Cora said postgame.
Over the course of 162 games, Cora is absolutely right. But here’s the thing: the Red Sox don’t have 162 games left to play around with. They don’t have 100. They don’t even have 50…
They only have 37.
And when you only have 37 games left to play with, and you’re on the outside of the playoff picture — now 4 1/2 games out of the final AL wild-card spot — looking in, the truth is you can no longer afford to “lose some.”
Cora’s team has lost the luxury of playing imperfect baseball.
The sentiment, unfortunately, also applied to the Red Sox’s weekend series against the Orioles.
Going in, I wrote that “a split would feel like an absolute win and probably keep them treading water a few games behind the Royals."
And so it was. These Red Sox as currently constituted probably got the best result they were capable of over the weekend in Baltimore.
But the second part of what I wrote is also true, and this time, it’s to their detriment. Boston entered the series against Baltimore trailing Kansas City by 2 1/2 games for the final AL wild card.
After a seemingly momentous split with the O’s, the Red Sox found themselves… 3 1/2 games behind the Royals. And again, today it’s 4 1/2.
Is that better than the alternative? You bet. The Sox are undoubtedly better off for winning two of four than they would have been winning one of — or none of — four.
At this stage of the season, and in the position the team finds itself in, Sunday’s rubber in Baltimore felt more like a lost series than it did a split worthy of celebration based on the position they had put themselves in going in.
If they were above the playoff cut line, it would have been a different story. But they aren’t. They’re in the hole they dug for themselves by playing leapfrog with .500 for far too long in the first half of the season.
Now on August 20th, with 37 games to go, those once acceptable four-game splits really need to produce three wins instead of two — and three-game series absolutely must be won.
That’s the problem with playing too much imperfect baseball. It means you need to play a lot of perfect baseball down the stretch to make up for it.
And those odds? They just don’t favor the Red Sox. Sure, a team can get hot for a couple of weeks or a month. But odds are odds for a reason. And as of Monday, FanGraphs had Boston at only a 32.4 percent chance of making the postseason.
But Cora, for one, is still talking like a man who believes his team will be on the right side of the picture once the dust settles.
“The way we throwing the ball the first to the sixth inning, we gonna be OK, we gonna be OK,” said Cora, who had the look in his eye of a man insistent, a man who fully believes what he’s saying. “I think that’s the most important thing.”
To his point, Boston’s starting pitching has looked more stable of late. Tanner Houck continued that trend on Monday with six innings of three-run (two earned) ball and eight strikeouts — all that before Lucas Sims gave up the tying run and Kenley Jansen served up a walk-off homer to Yainer Diaz in the ninth.
Between the recent performances of Houck, Kutter Crawford and Brayan Bello — three arms who were trending downward at the wrong time — it certainly does appear that Andrew Bailey may have done it again. Cora sure thinks so.
“We struggled there for a little bit, and the bullpen paid the price,” he said. “Now we’re throwing the ball extremely well from our starters. You know, they’re giving us a chance to win. That’s what happened early in the season, and I think we’re going to continue doing that.”
The script is still yet to be finished, and the pen remains in their hands.
It better be one heck of a closing act…
Gethin Coolbaugh is a columnist for Boston Sports Journal. Follow him @GethinCoolbaugh on X/Twitter.