What happened to fundamentals? It’s one thing to lose because the other guys have more talent. It’s another to beat yourself, and the Red Sox did a lot of that over the last three days en route to a sweep at the hands of the lowly Pirates.
The play that perhaps best encapsulates the first week of the season came in Wednesday’s dispiriting 4-1 loss, when the Red Sox made five errors of the physical and mental variety in the span of two plays.
First, first baseman Triston Casas got waaaaay too aggressive on a ground ball with a runner on second, trying unwisely to peg catcher Jason Delay at third instead of taking the sure out at first. Delay beat out a bang-bang play and the speedy O’Neil Cruz ended up on first, which would become relevant momentarily.
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“I felt like we needed a big play to shift some of the momentum,” Casas said, and man was momentum about to shift, but not in a good way.
“If it’s a one-hopper to him, oh yeah, he has him at third, but it wasn’t,” said manager Alex Cora.
In any event, that’s mental error No. 1.
No. 2 came on the next batter, when the dangerous Bryan Reynolds skied harmlessly to medium left, which felt like a victory after the all-out assault he had waged through the first two games of the series. Newcomer Masataka Yoshida camped under the ball and then threw home, even though he had no play. Cruz alertly tagged for second as the run scored. That’s mental error No. 2.
“I mean, you’ve got to make the decision right there,” said Cora. “You’re not going to throw him out. Just throw to second base.”
Yoshida’s ill-advised heave set the stage for errors 3, 4, and 5. First, third baseman Rafael Devers failed to cut the throw, even though he might’ve had a play at second on Cruz. But then catcher Connor Wong watched the ball roll right by him, allowing Cruz to break for the unmanned third base with Devers in purgatory and giving Yoshida the only official error of the sequence.
Devers raced to cover the bag, arriving at the same time as Cruz. He caught Wong’s throw in time to apply a tag, but lost the ball in a collision. Both runner and fielder ended up grimacing/limping/flexing, but for the second time in the inning, Cruz was safe instead of out, and he scored one batter later on Carlos Santana’s two-out double.
A manageable 2-0 deficit ballooned to 4-0, and that was all she wrote.
“You make bad decisions, you put yourself in a bad spot, and that’s what happens,” Cora said.
Add the fact that the Pirates stole two more bases — opponents are now 14 for 14 — and it’s fair to wonder if the Red Sox were ready to go this season after six weeks of assurances that they’d play hard and play right and all of those other cliches that are meaningless once the games start.
It was hard to miss, for instance, the juxtaposition of the Pirates perfectly executing a squeeze play for a run in the same sixth inning that ended with the Red Sox running into a double play on a hit-and-run flare to short.
“We didn’t play good baseball,” Cora said. “Obviously the running game, we’ve got to do a better job. We showed some flashes of good stuff, but overall, like today, that wasn’t good. When you are not scoring runs like the last two days, you’ve got to be on point. Even when you score runs, you’ve got to play better defense. And I think we just made bad decisions.”
Given the talent gap between the Red Sox and the rest of the division, they can barely tolerate physical errors. But mental ones? If they don’t clean those up, the season will be over by May.
