The Boston Red Sox Saturday, August 15, 2020

* The Boston Globe

Struggles continue for sloppy Red Sox in another blowout loss to Yankees

Peter Abraham

NEW YORK — The Red Sox lack pitching talent and their record is a reflection of that. It’s the foundation of all their problems.

But what has made this season a rolling disaster is the lack of attention to detail. Friday night’s 10-3 loss against the Yankees offered the latest example.

The Sox trailed by a run when Ryan Brasier came out of the bullpen to start the fifth inning. He got two quick outs before Gleyber Torres singled.

Torres hasn’t stolen a base this season and the Sox had first baseman Mitch Moreland play off the bag against Mike Tauchman, a lefthanded hitter.

Moreland told Brasier he was dropping back. But Brasier nevertheless twirled to throw to first and was charged with a balk.

“Ryan forgot,” manager Ron Roenicke said.

Torres easily scored when Tauchman doubled to left field. Gary Sanchez followed with a 457-foot home run to center when Brasier threw a two-strike up and over the plate.

Sanchez extended his arms and hammered it as Brasier grimaced

The needless balk helped turn a winnable game into just the latest rout for the Sox.

“We can take getting beat,” Roenicke said. “But we don’t want to give it to teams. Every time we do, they capitalize on it. We can try to focus more but I don’t think that’s necessarily the issue, the focus. I don’t know. It’s just things aren’t going well.”

The Sox (6-14) have lost five straight and 10 of the last 13. For the first time since 1930, they have allowed eight or more runs in five consecutive games. That ties a franchise record.

It was suggested to Roenicke that such pitching is embarrassing.

“I’m certainly not going to go there,” he said. “But, yeah, we need to pitch better. But some of it is we’re not making plays when we need to make plays.”

Embarrassing fits. Sox pitchers have given up an astonishing 45 earned runs on 73 hits and 26 walks over the last 44 innings. Their ERA has climbed from 4.74 to 5.86.

With the season now a third over, the Sox are 7½ games out of first place and have the worst record in the American League.

“I think everybody can be better,” said Alex Verdugo, whose home run off Gerrit Cole was a bauble in the trash heap. “We all could be better as a team. It’s not just from the pitching standpoint. From all aspects we have to sharpen it up.”

Tauchman was 3 for 5 with four RBIs. Torres was 4 for 4 and drove in two. The Yankees collected 14 hits and that was with Aaron Judge going on the injured list earlier in the day.

Colten Brewer made his first career start and apparently it won’t be his last as the Sox left him on the mound for 2⅔ innings and 73 pitches, 21 more than his previous career high. Brewer, predictably, held the Yankees down for two innings then tired in the third.

Luke Voit singled and Aaron Hicks walked to start the inning. They scored on a double to right field by Torres.

Austin Brice struck out three of the five batters he faced to hold the Yankees at two runs. The righthander is averaging a healthy 13.1 strikeouts per nine innings this season.

Brasier came on and the Yankees took control of the game. It got worse in the seventh inning when Dylan Covey gave up three runs on four hits, two on a double by Clint Frazier.

Covey was the pitcher the Red Sox acquired from the Rays in July for $1. He has given up five earned runs over 6⅓ innings.

Cole didn’t have much trouble with the Sox. The righthander allowed one run on four hits and struck out eight without a walk over seven innings.

Cole faced nine hitters over the first three innings. Kevin Pillar reached on a single but was thrown out trying to steal second.

Verdugo lofted a curveball into the second deck in right field leading off the fourth inning. It was his fourth home run.

“We knew today would be hard. We knew it would be challenging,” Verdugo said.

The Sox had a chance to take the lead in the fifth inning when Christian Vazquez singled and went to third on a two-out double by Jackie Bradley Jr.

But rookie second baseman Jonathan Arauz grounded to third. It was the first of seven batters in a row Cole retired to end his outing.

Cole, who has won 20 straight decisions dating to May 2019, is 4-0 with a 2.76 ERA in five starts.

The Sox are winless in four games against the first-place Yankees this season and have lost 12 of their last 13 games in the Bronx.

It’s not much of a rivalry these days. The Yankees have won 18 of the 23 games between the teams since the start of last season.

Reality has sunk in — this Red Sox team is unsalvageable

Alex Speier

On April 17, 2019, the Red Sox left Yankee Stadium with a head-spinning 6-13 record, a reigning World Series champion staggering at the start of its title defense. On Friday, the Red Sox arrived at Yankee Stadium with the same 6-13 record after 19 games.

“Really?” Xander Bogaerts noted with amazement. “I didn’t even know.”

The shortstop’s astonishment was forgivable. After all, the path to those points was entirely different.

The 2019 team was loaded with talent but underperforming. It soon found its footing and had a 31-29 mark after 60 games. Its 84-78 record didn’t yield a postseason berth, but the team would have qualified for a 16- team playoff field (or at least tied for the final spot) in each of the 103 60-game intervals of the 162-game season.

“That’s actually one of the best things I’ve heard this year at this point,” suggested Bogaerts.

Or not. After all, the 6-13 start in 2020 — 6-14 after the 10-3 loss to the Yankees on Friday night — seems less like an aberration and more a cold unmasking of a deeply flawed team, a point reinforced when Bogaerts was asked to compare the experience of playing for last-place teams in 2014 and 2015 with what he’s experienced to start this dystopian 2020 campaign.

“This one kind of sucks more,” he acknowledged. “It’s more recent, you know? It’s what you’re living in at this moment.”

The moment is grim. Thursday’s 17-8 loss to the Rays, followed later that night by the record-tying sixth career three-homer game by Dodgers leadoff hitter Mookie Betts, came off like a cartoonish plummet into a ravine in which the crash at rock bottom was followed by an anvil to the head.

“We expect to field a competitive team each year,” Red Sox chairman Tom Werner said on NESN. “We obviously don’t have enough pieces right now to compete.”

In fact, a case can be made that the organization’s talent base in the big leagues and minors is at a low point since the current owners took over in 2002. In past last-place seasons (2012, 2014, 2015), the team featured incredible clusters of talent either in the minors or gaining their footing at the start of their big league careers.

By contrast, Baseball America ranked the Red Sox as the No. 23 farm system this week. Perhaps there are players who eventually exceed industry projections and make that ranking seem too pessimistic. Even so, while the organization has some minor league depth, it lacks consensus impact players who are close to the big leagues — part of the team’s rationale for dealing Betts for young players.

This year should be treated as lost. What about 2021?

The pitching Even with Betts, the current pitching staff would all but ensure that this would not be a good team. In fact, it likely would be considerably worse than last year’s 84-78 club — a team that had exactly half of its games started by Eduardo Rodriguez, Chris Sale, and David Price. They’re all gone.

“It’s definitely tough,” said Nate Eovaldi. “Losing Eddie to COVID, that was unexpected. We weren’t ready for that. Now it’s Martin [Perez] and I.”

Two credible starters does not make a rotation. It doesn’t even make a half-turn.

At the same time, the level of major league talent moving forward should be better than it is right now. Rodriguez is expected back in 2021, and Sale should be back in the rotation for much of it.

A rotation with Rodriguez and Sale along with some approximation of what the team has gotten from Nate Eovaldi and Martin Perez certainly should be competitive. But there’s no certainty that those four — especially Sale — will be healthy and performing to their capabilities for all of 2021, reinforcing the significance of depth.

The ongoing open audition for starter spots right now suggests that the Sox lack reliable depth beyond those four. Perhaps Darwinzon Hernandez and/or Bryan Mata will make progress to solidify the back of the rotation. Maybe Kyle Hart, Tanner Houck, or Chris Mazza makes a case to offer spot starter depth.

But even with a return to health for their anticipated mainstays, the Sox need to build a better and deeper rotation. Barring a breakthrough by someone currently on the big league roster, the Sox likely will need to add at least one starter and probably two (perhaps a swingman).

The lineup The Red Sox lineup is averaging 4.5 runs per game, slightly below average. It should be much better.

“We expected to have a good offense, a relentless offense,” said Werner. “Even our offense has not clicked the way we would have hoped.”

The struggles of two players are most jarring given their status as long-term cornerstones. There are 193 big leaguers who have had at least 50 plate appearances this year. Rafael Devers (.552 OPS, 176th) and Andrew Benintendi (.442, 191st) rank among the bottom 10 percent in OPS. Those numbers are shocking, but also based on a stretch of the season that ordinarily would be shrugged off as a small sample.

And really, the Sox have little alternative but to look beyond those starts and try to restore both players to past production. If Benintendi is an above-average player and Devers is a middle-of-the-order standout, then in combination with Xander Bogaerts, J.D. Martinez (assuming he doesn’t opt out), Christian Vazquez, and Alex Verdugo, the Sox have a strong talent base, standing to benefit from complementary players but not in need of a drastic overhaul. If Devers and Benintendi don’t rebound, the team’s hopes of returning to contention in 2021 would seem remote.

The Sox have some promising reinforcements at the infield corners (Bobby Dalbec), middle infield (Jeter Downs), and outfield (Jarren Duran) at the Alternate Training Site in Pawtucket. Those players are at least depth options, and perhaps more, though they’re widely viewed more as solid everyday players than future stars.

Culture There are extenuating circumstances that can potentially contribute to widespread performance downturns: Unexpected managerial change, the dizzying trade of Betts and Price on the doorstep to the season, massive roster turnover that loosened clubhouse bonds, the stress of playing in a pandemic, the changes to routines introduced by COVID-19 protocols.

“There’s no doubt this season is way harder than any that anybody’s ever been through,” said manager Ron Roenicke. “And also when you’re not playing well, it makes it harder.”

Those atypical elements can make it difficult to evaluate players properly. Nonetheless, the 2020 Red Sox have obvious deficiencies that make it just as obvious that change is coming.

Werner said that the team is willing to deal away players over whom they have limited control — with soon-to-be-free-agents Jackie Bradley Jr., Kevin Pillar, Mitch Moreland, and Brandon Workman representing obvious candidates — in exchange for players who can help longer term. Whether Martinez — who can opt out after this year — likewise falls into that category remains to be seen.

However they approach it, the benefit of the rough start is that it has laid bare the team’s flaws. The Red Sox are ill-equipped to compete in 2020, and seem destined to endure pain while focusing their attention on developing and trading for players who will be poised to help in 2021 or beyond.

Red Sox will give Jonathan Arauz chance to prove he belongs

Peter Abraham

NEW YORK — That Jonathan Arauz started at second base in Friday night’s 10-3 loss to the Yankees was a nod of recognition to the 22-year-old rookie from Panama that his improvement in recent weeks hasn’t gone unnoticed by the coaching staff.

It also was an acknowledgement that the Red Sox understand their season is almost certainly beyond redemption at this point, so why not give Arauz more playing time?

The Red Sox picked Arauz in the Rule 5 Draft in December and were impressed with what they saw of him in spring training.

“He did a nice job defensively,” manager Ron Roenicke said. “He has good hands; you could see that his arm was good. Everything he has allows you to think he’ll do well except for experience.”

Before the Red Sox gave him a chance, Arauz had played five years in the Houston organization, getting as far as Double A but not meriting a spot on the 40-man roster.

After going hitless in his first 10 a-bats with the Sox, the switch-hitter is 9 of 16 with a double and four RBIs. He was 1 for 3 on Friday. Opponents will adjust, but Arauz has potential as a hitter.

“He’s really confident and he’s very talented,” Roenicke said. “He’s got good hands. He catches up with a good fastball.”

Holding on to a Rule 5 pick this season requires him being on the active roster for 50 days. Otherwise the player would have to be offered back to his former organization.

With rosters expanded to 28, the Red Sox shouldn’t have a problem doing that, barring injury. Arauz had a rough day defensively in Thursday’s 17-8 loss against the Rays. But he was back out there Friday.

Why not?

“You want to see how he reacts when things don’t go well,” Roenicke said.

Arauz made a diving stop behind second base in the first inning on Friday night to save a run for Colten Brewer.

Arauz is the first Panamanian on the Red Sox roster since outfielder Ben Oglivie (1971-73).

Judge to IL The Red Sox won’t have to deal with Aaron Judge this weekend. He was placed on the injured list with what manager Aaron Boone termed a mild strain of the right half. The move was retroactive to Wednesday.

The Yankees also are without perpetually injured Giancarlo Stanton, who has a strained left hamstring.

“We’ve lost two MVP-caliber players, so obviously that’s a blow,” Boone said.

The Yankees recalled infielder Thairo Estrada.

Cast of characters Brewer was the 10th starting pitcher the Red Sox have used this season, the most in the majors. And that’s without playing any doubleheaders. Through Thursday, the major league average was 6.7 discounting the five games the Cardinals have been limited to … Nate Eovaldi will start Saturday on an extra day of rest. The righthander threw only 22 innings in his first four starts but the Sox are trying to be careful with him. Eovaldi has a 1.95 earned run average in eight career appearances against the Yankees, five of them starts. He has not faced them since Aug. 2, 2019 …According to Elias Sports, Kevin Plawecki on Thursday became the first Red Sox player to catch and pitch in the same game … Friday marked the 56th start Xander Bogaerts had made at the current Yankee Stadium, matching J.J. Hardy for the most by a visiting shortstop … Infielder Christian Arroyo, who was claimed off waivers from Cleveland on Thursday, has not yet joined the team. He first has to clear intake testing. Arroyo is out of minor league options, so once he is cleared, the Sox will have to make a roster move to keep him.

* The Boston Herald

Alex Verdugo a bright spot in Red Sox’ terrible start to 2020 season

Jason Mastrodonato

It’s hard to see the silver lining when the Red Sox are playing as poorly as they have in almost a decade, but there is one.

The silver lining is Alex Verdugo.

He’s going to get compared to Mookie Betts (we’ve done it here several times), and while Betts is feeding the hungry in Los Angeles and collecting his first three-homer game in a Dodgers uniform, it won’t be easy for Verdugo to get the attention he deserves.

But the 24-year-old is starting to look a legitimate young hitter, and doing so after coming off invasive back surgery in the offseason.

Friday night, the Red Sox looked embarrassed by the Yankees in a 10-3 loss, though manager Ron Roenicke wouldn’t use that word.

“Well I’m certainly not going to go there, but yeah, we need to pitch better,” Roenicke said.

In the fourth inning, before the alleged embarrassment, Verdugo stepped up against maybe the best pitcher in baseball, Gerrit Cole, and beat him.

Cole started him with a vicious curve, a pitch that, along with his slider, destroyed the Red Sox in this game. Verdugo watched it drop under the zone for a ball. Cole came back with a fastball on the outer half and Verdugo took that one too.

Verdugo thought another curve was coming. Cole threw him one, and it dropped under the zone just like the first one. This time, the former top prospect with the Dodgers took a big swing and demolished it into the second set of bleacher seats in right field.

“I happened to see a curveball pop out of the hand a little bit, and as I was going to it, I was able to really keep my bat path and keep everything where it needed to be and ended up clipping it,” he said.

Verdugo gently flipped his bat toward the Yankees dugout and rounded the bases for his fourth homer of the season and 18th of his career. With just over 500 at-bats, the 20-homer pace is a nice start. But the Sox think he can develop into a legitimate power threat while hitting for average, something he’s shown the ability to do in short stints so far this season.

When he’s not fighting off touch pitches to send them opposite-field for singles, he can hammer anything he gets his arms extended on.

“I like to take the first pitch through all my at-bats, especially coming into this division and it’s my first time facing a lot of these pitchers so I take the first pitch a lot,” he said. “That at-bat, he threw me a curveball that I took for the first pitch and I felt like I saw it well. I felt good on it. I felt good on the take. And then he threw a fastball, I think, outside corner for a strike and it was one of those things, I think my approach at that particular time was really, really good.”

To do it against Cole was particularly impressive. He’s now homered off Cole, Eduardo Rodriguez, Yu Darvish and Adam Ottavino, among others, during his brief big league career.

“That’s one of the best, if not the best pitcher in the game,” Verdugo said of Cole. “So we knew today was going to be hard. We knew it was going to be challenging. But really with those guys, you can’t try to muscle up and try to match their power. Those are guys that have so much power, so much velo to their stuff that the softer you are, the more handsy you are with those kinds of guys, the more the ball jumps off and they supply it. So, for me today against Cole, I wanted him to supply the power.”

The Red Sox are 6-14 and going nowhere fast. It’s somewhat of a surprise that nobody has opted out of the season after their terrible start.

But Verdugo continues to impress, even in less-than-ideal circumstances.

“We know we’re not playing to our best, and you see guys pushing,” he said. “You see guys stressing out a little bit. I’m one of them. So it’s just, really, everybody kind of needs to just take a deep breath, kind of relax and try to do less. That’s, at least personally, has worked for me. Every time I go up there, whether it’s offense, defense or running bases.

“If I feel like I’m trying to force something to happen, a lot of times it doesn’t happen. I feel like if I’m going up there and just letting the game transpire and just play – take what they give you, really – I feel like everything kind of settles in.”

Three takeaways from Red Sox’ 10-3 loss to Yankees: Pitching in historic rut

Jason Mastrodonato

Yankees 10, Red Sox 3 The Red Sox saw their league-worst record drop to 6-14. Here are the takeaways:

1. It’s hard to have a bullpen game without a bullpen This was supposed to be a bullpen game. But the Red Sox don’t have much of a bullpen right now.

Ron Roenicke is managing his bullpen not simply by finding the perfect matchup, but largely on whoever is healthy and rested enough to pitch.

Colten Brewer got the start and the Yankees had baserunners from start to finish. Brewer, who hadn’t thrown more than 45 pitches in a game until this year, gave his team 73 pitches and recorded eight outs while the Yankees plated two off him.

“We’re trying to figure out where he best fits in, whether as a starter or we really like him in long relief,” Roenicke said.

Austin Brice looked great for four outs behind Brewer, then Ryan Brasier was knocked around for three runs, including a monster homer by Gary Sanchez.

Dylan Covey, who was acquired from the Rays for nothing last month, gave up three runs behind Brasier.

The Sox entered the game leading the American League by allowing 5.9 runs per game and extended their lead with yet another ugly night on the mound. They’ve now allowed at least eight runs in five straight games, which ties the longest streak in franchise history and hasn’t happened in 90 years.

In total, the Sox have allowed 52 runs in their last four games.

They’re 1-11 in games not started by either Nathan Eovaldi or Martin Perez. They’ve gotten starts of four innings or less in all 12 of those games.

“We need to do everything a little better,” Roenicke said. “We need to pitch better, play better defense, hit better. We just don’t have it working real well right now.”

But hey, they got Brandon Workman some work for the first time in a week. The closer took the ball with the Sox down 8-3 in the eighth inning and struggled to put guys away. After allowing two runs, Workman was relieved by Marcus Walden.

So they used three of their least reliable pitchers (Brewer, Brasier, Covey) early in the game, and two of their most reliable (Workman, Walden) when the game was well out of reach.

Managing this bullpen, in this season, seems like a terrible job to have, but the order in which they were used Friday doesn’t seem ideal.

2. J.D. Martinez had a remarkably bad game Maybe Gerrit Cole got into Martinez’s head. This one was ugly.

It started when Martinez swung at Cole’s slider in the dirt and then a fastball well off the plate to strike out in the first inning.

He swung at two more sliders to strike out in the fourth.

Over his final two at-bats, Martinez saw six pitches, all strikes, and struck out two more times.

The third at-bat was surely one of the worst by Martinez in a Red Sox uniform. Cole went change up- curve-slider and Martinez didn’t swing until the third pitch, a slider below the plate. He took a low-effort swing, clearly fooled by the pitch, and walked back to the dugout.

Against Adam Ottavino in the eighth, Martinez watched three straight pitches to fan for the fourth time and collect the ninth golden sombrero of his career.

He had been hot, with two homers and six RBIs in his last four games, but Martinez looked checked out in this game.

“Chasing,” Roenicke said of Martinez’s bad night. “Obviously a great pitcher makes you chase a lot more. But every time I looked up at a strikeout it was right exactly on the corner somewhere and it’s great stuff. So whether it’s 97 mph fastball or a great slider, curveball, this is a really good pitcher and you have to be on your game in order to have great at-bats against him.”

3. Alex Verdugo made a statement When the rest of his team was struggling against Cole, Verdugo waited for a curveball at the bottom of the zone and got his arms extended for a beautiful swing in the fourth inning. The ball was smoked into the second level of seats in right field at Yankee Stadium as Verdugo offered a little bat flip for emphasis.

The solo shot was his fourth homer of the season.

Red Sox’ ugly season risks long-term damage to winning culture

Jason Mastrodonato

There’s a reason why the best franchises in the big leagues are wary of tanking, even when it makes sense to do so.

Losing is contagious. It’s addicting. And the minute it becomes acceptable, the franchise risks carrying the stink of failure with it for the foreseeable future.

Fans will lose interest. Free agents won’t want to sign there. Prospects won’t have anything to aspire to.

And the competitive culture that Xander Bogaerts was brought into as a 20-year-old in 2013 will fade away in favor of one that screams, “any pitcher released by another team is welcome to play here.”

“Being thrown into the playoff race in 2013, that was tough, you know?” Bogaerts said Friday. “Every game meant something. I think we got called up in a different type of situation (than players this year). … It sucks for these guys to be able to make their debuts and not have the fan perspective of the pressure and how amazing it is for all those seats to be filled up. Hopefully we can get back to that soon.”

The Red Sox have made two critical sins in their approach to the 2020 season.

First, they brought in a brand new leader of the front office, Chaim Bloom, to trade one of their best players in franchise history.

The Arizona Diamondbacks did something similar, when they traded Paul Goldschmidt two years after Mike Hazen arrived from Boston to take over the front office. Hazen’s right-hand man, Amiel Sawdaye, told the Herald the key was not trading Goldschmidt in the first year.

“The first year is a tough year,” Sawdaye said in 2019. “Anytime you walk in and trade somebody without knowing them, it’s a pretty bad, a pretty tough thing to do.”

But the Diamondbacks followed up the trade by acquiring other quality players. It wasn’t a full-on rebuild. They didn’t tank largely because Hazen learned from his time in Boston that tanking is dangerous, and going into a season without a deep roster of big league players puts you at risk for the kind of season the Red Sox are having right now.

“I think that’s important long-term for the future of the organization, too, is that the culture of winning is something you can’t just say,” Hazen said last year. “You have to be able to go out there and try to do it too.”

The Sox planned on going into the 2020 season with Chris Sale, Eduardo Rodriguez, Nathan Eovaldi and Martin Perez as their top four starters. But they had no depth. And they never addressed it. When Sale underwent Tommy John surgery, the Sox never replaced him. And when Rodriguez unexpectedly suffered a heart condition related to the coronavirus, the Sox never replaced him (claiming other team’s designated players doesn’t count, because it obviously doesn’t work).

Losing two more pitchers to the virus (Darwinzon Hernandez and Josh Taylor) made this pitching staff one that required not just a few patches, but a giant makeover, and one that the Red Sox never wanted to go through.

That’s how you end up with a 17-8 loss like Thursday’s, when the Sox ended the game with their backup catcher on the mound, their starting catcher at second base and their utility infielder behind the plate.

Losing is addicting when it becomes accepted, and that’s the risk with Thursday’s loss.

All the excuses, even the most legitimate of the bunch, can’t erase the stain of a team that learns to accept losing.

While the pitchers allow more runs than anyone else in the American League and the offensive players realize that scoring six runs a game is merely the baseline to go .500, they stop caring. Even if they don’t want to, some will.

“You just have to be there for your teammates, especially at a time like this,” Bogaerts said. “When you see guys with their heads down, you just have to go and remind them that you’re here for them and anything that they need and you want to see them succeed so bad. It’s been rough.”

One of the reasons Bogaerts has been so successful is that the culture of winning was already installed into the fabric of the Red Sox when he arrived.

Dustin Pedroia and David Ortiz and Jon Lester made sure of it. And when the Sox struggled in 2014 and 2015, Bogaerts knew that it wasn’t acceptable. Even as a 21- and 22-year-old, he was the one standing in front of his locker after another disappointing loss to hold himself and his team accountable.

Look across the big leagues at the best franchises in the game’s history, and you’ll see a clear avoidance of tanking. The Washington Post’s Thomas Boswell summarized it well in a column last year:

“The Boston Red Sox have had only one season with more than 93 loses since 1932. Baseball-loving Cincinnati has seen only one Reds team lose 100 games since its inception in 1882. Baseball in Los Angeles draws huge crowds. Sure, it’s sunny. But entertainment competition is huge. The Dodgers and Angels, in a combined 121 seasons in L.A., have had only one team that lost more than 95 games. The Yankees, a special case to be sure, haven’t lost 100 since they were the Highlanders in 1912. The “best fans in baseball?” Maybe St. Louis. The last Cardinals team to lose even 95 games was in — come on, guess — 1913.”

Tanking destroys the culture unless there’s a clear long-term plan set forth by the front office, communicated to the manager and field staff, and then properly digested by a roster that needs to buy in while simultaneously giving their all to the season at hand.

That’s not even close to what the Red Sox are doing.

The only bright side is that Sale is finding optimism in his recovery from Tommy John surgery. He’s enjoying himself in Fort Myers, where he’s commuting to JetBlue Park from his nearby home and entering every day with a smile and positive attitude. He wants to play for 10 more years.

The Sox ought to be thankful he isn’t around their decaying group in Boston, because they need at least one smiling face to recruit any potential free agents this winter, when the stink of this putrid season isn’t going to fade quickly.

Asked about the fear of creating a losing culture before the Sox’ series with the Yankees this weekend, manager Ron Roenicke fought back.

“It’s not at the point now where I really need to address it because I still see the way the guys are,” he said. “They aren’t happy with this losing. I still see the effort level, I still see how they prepare going into every single game we play. And the attitude, what they talk about before the game, and it’s still been good.

“We realize coming into it, when we lost the two starters we lost, we realized pitching could be a difficulty. We were still hoping some of these guys would get locked in and able to fill those spots. But they know we need to swing the bat well. … So at this point I don’t think I need to address that part. I’m just hoping things turn around, and quickly, and hopefully I won’t have to have that conversation.”

* The Providence Journal

These Red Sox are making the wrong kind of history

Bill Koch

It wouldn’t be a Red Sox game this season without a mental mistake to ultimately help change the final outcome.

Gerrit Cole and the Yankees certainly don’t need the help. But Boston, as they have over the balance of 20 games, was only too willing to provide it Friday night.

Ryan Brasier’s balk in the bottom of the fifth inning was the kind of blunder that has become common. Mike Tauchman’s RBI double and a mammoth two-run homer by Gary Sanchez were familiar punishments.

New York pulled away for a comfortable 10-3 win, the latest humiliation for a Red Sox team making the wrong sort of history. Boston has allowed at least eight runs in five straight games, the first time that’s happened since 1930.

When asked if the ongoing events were embarrassing, Red Sox manager Ron Roenicke politely declined to describe them as such. To admit such a thing could be to risk losing a clubhouse already making personal sacrifices to play through the COVID-19 pandemic. But there is still a professional standard that must be upheld, and Boston has failed to meet it through a third of its season.

“Well, I’m certainly not going to go there,” Roenicke said. “But we need to pitch better.

“Some of it is we’re not making plays when we need to make plays. We can get pitchers more outs and extend longer in the game. But we need to do everything a little better.

“We need to pitch better. We need to play better defense. We need to hit better. We just don’t have it working real well right now.”

It was a 2-1 game when Brasier entered and promptly retired the first two men he faced. Then Gleyber Torres singled through the left side as part of his 4-for-4 night and Tauchman worked the count full. Mitch Moreland moved behind Torres with Tauchman, a left-handed hitter, at the plate.

“Mitch told him he was behind him and Ryan forgot,” Roenicke said. “He threw over to first.”

Brasier actually turned and held the ball while making a throwing motion. He recognized too late what everyone else at Yankee Stadium could already plainly see. Then Tauchman sent a looper down the line in left and Sanchez visited the bleachers 457 feet away in left-center.

“We know what’s going on,” said Alex Verdugo, who cracked a solo homer. “We know we’re not playing to our best. You see guys pushing. You see guys stressing out a little bit.”

Cole wasn’t one of them. The right-hander barely broke a sweat through his seven innings, striking out eight against no walks. Cole escaped his lone real jam in the fifth when Jonathan Arauz grounded to Gio Urshela with two men in scoring position.

“That’s one of the best, if not the best, pitchers in the game,” Verdugo said. “We knew today was going to be hard. We knew it was going to be challenging.”

How many opponents say the same when facing the Boston staff? The Rays and Yankees have piled up 52 runs in the five days since Nathan Eovaldi last took the mound. The Red Sox compiled a 5.60 earned-run average through their first 19 games, a number that only climbed higher after this latest bludgeoning.

“We can take getting beat, but we don’t want to give it to teams,” Roenicke said. “Every time we do they capitalize on it. We make an error and all of a sudden they hit a homer.

“We’re just doing things that give teams opportunities to score runs.”

Boston is 3-23 in its last 26 games against Tampa Bay and New York. The Red Sox are thoroughly outclassed in this American League East race, and it still has 40 games to run. The immortal Rabbit Warstler slashed .185/.275/.253 in 54 games for that dreadful Boston club 90 years ago, and the Red Sox finished 52-102.

That’s a .338 winning percentage. Boston currently checks in at .300 and is sinking fast.

Red Sox Journal: Players trying to maintain a positive attitude

Bill Koch

All the Red Sox can do now is turn the page.

The four-game drilling handed out by the Rays at Fenway Park is over. Boston will be on the road for 11 of its next 13, including the next four against the Yankees in the Bronx.

Thursday’s 17-8 defeat against Tampa Bay included a pair of position players taking the mound in the top of the ninth inning. Jose Peraza was struck on the right knee by a line drive, forcing Kevin Plawecki to ditch his catcher’s gear and record the final two outs.

“Obviously you can’t control what happened already,” Red Sox shortstop Xander Bogaerts said. “Those games are over with. Just try to control what we have going forward. Try to go out there and have some fun.”

Is that possible in this era of pandemic baseball? COVID-19 has stripped the togetherness from clubs like Boston. The home clubhouse has been replaced by suites, and road trips include none of the team dinners or other bonding opportunities that existed in the past. There is little chance to truly kick back and refresh away from the field.

“They’re not happy with this losing,” Boston manager Ron Roenicke said. “I still see the effort level. I still see how they prepare going into every single game we play. The attitude, what they talk about before the game — it’s still been good.”

Some have appeared more crestfallen than others. Rafael Devers made three errors on Thursday and cast his eyes skyward after one of them, searching to the heavens for an answer. He walked from the dugout to his position in the ninth, a course of action that would generally earn a verbal rebuke from a stern high school or college coach.

“Some guys, it’s not going the way they want to,” Bogaerts said. “It’s been tough. Just got to be there for your teammates at a time like this. If you see their heads down, you’ve got to go and remind them that you’re here for them — anything they need.

“You want to see them succeed so bad. It’s also when you see it because you know what these guys are capable of. It’s been rough. Hopefully we can find ways to have fun and that will change.”

Switch in the rotation

The Red Sox have opted to break up Nathan Eovaldi and Martin Perez in their starting rotation.

Eovaldi will pitch on Saturday and Perez takes the ball on Monday against the Yankees. Both will enter their next outing in the Bronx with an extra day of rest.

“We’ve got two guys who we know are going to start,” Roenicke said. “They’ve been giving us length. It is nice to spread those guys out. Both of those reasons are why we’ve done this.”

Colten Brewer drew the start on Friday night in what was expected to be a bullpen day. Boston will make a roster move ahead of Sunday’s game and call up a starting pitcher from the alternate site at Pawtucket. Chris Mazza is among those in contention after 2 2/3 solid frames during the first Red Sox trip to the Bronx.

“Our games are that much more important to make sure we win those,” Eovaldi said. “Then we’re asking our bullpen to fill in another big role and try to fill in three games in between there.”

Boston starters aside from Eovaldi and Perez entered Friday night with a 10.45 earned-run average.

Around the diamond

Peraza (right knee) was out of the lineup on Friday night.

The infielder took a line drive off his right knee while pitching in the ninth inning of Thursday’s 17-8 loss against the Rays. Post-game x-rays were negative and Peraza was expected to be available again as early as Saturday.

“He was actually doing well when I went in after the game,” Roenicke said. “I actually walked off the plane right behind him last night and he wasn’t limping going down the steps.”

Jonathan Arauz made his sixth career start in place of Peraza. He’s on an 8-for-13 roll after beginning his career hitless in 10 at-bats. For the sake of comparison, regulars like Jackie Bradley Jr. and Andrew Benintendi have a combined eight hits in their last 82 at-bats.

Red Sox impressed with Arauz’s confidence

Bill Koch

Yankee Stadium served as the venue for Jonathan Arauz’s sixth big-league start on Friday night.

The youngest player on the Red Sox active roster has made an impression through the season’s first 19 games. Arauz, who turned 22 on Aug. 3, has more than compensated for coming up empty in his first 10 at- bats, piling up multiple hits in three of his last four games.

“Everything he has [done] allows you to think he’s going to do well except for experience,” Boston manager Ron Roenicke said. “Because of his makeup, the experience doesn’t seem to bother him that much. He’s so confident in what he can do.”

Arauz was a Rule 5 Draft selection from the Astros who had never appeared in a game above the Double-A level. The switch-hitter is now on an 8-for-13 run at the plate, piecing together a four-game hitting streak. He was at second base as Boston visited New York for the first game of this weekend’s four-game series.

“I’ve never seen him lose confidence,” Red Sox shortstop Xander Bogaerts said. “That speaks a lot about a young kid.”

Bogaerts was a 20-year-old rookie thrust into a pennant race when he debuted in 2013. One of the top prospects in baseball was promoted after 60 games with Triple-A Pawtucket and played 18 times for Boston down the stretch. He’s now the club’s de facto captain and a two-time World Series winner, including that first season’s October victory over the Cardinals.

“Being thrown into the playoff race, that was tough,” Bogaerts said. “Every game meant something. I think we got called up in a different type of situation.”

The Red Sox have staggered to a 6-13 start in this 60-game campaign, including a four-game sweep at Fenway Park against the Rays this week. Arauz made an early error at second base in Thursday’s 17-8 spanking and misplayed another grounder later in the game. Those two misplays were different from the fine defensive showing he managed at third base earlier in the week, including a couple of slick plays on the backhand.

“You want to see how a guy reacts when things don’t go well,” Roenicke said. “We’ll see how he reacts today after making a couple of mistakes yesterday. If they go well there — I would be surprised if it didn’t.

“It’s just his makeup. He’s really confident. He is very talented. I would be surprised if it wasn’t good today.”

Arauz was an international signing from Panama by the Phillies in 2014 and was part of a seven-player trade with Houston in 2015. The Astros left him off their 40-man roster entering the offseason, exposing him for selection to the other 29 clubs. Boston will be forced to keep him on its active 28-man roster to retain his rights going forward.

“In Fort Myers, we thought he was very calm in all situations,” Roenicke said, referencing spring training. “We liked his swing. We thought he did a nice job defensively. We knew he had good hands because they work with him all the time — they can see that. You can see his arm is good.”

Arauz was a utility option entering summer camp but has quickly worked his way up the depth chart. Jose Peraza (right knee) was out of the lineup on Friday and Michael Chavis has worked as more of a platoon option with Mitch Moreland at first base. Arauz, as a switch-hitter, offers more lineup flexibility than Tzu- Wei Lin.

“I think the plan at the beginning was more Chavis and Peraza and how they were doing,” Roenicke said. “Whoever was playing better, we were going to put him out there more often. We know Lin is still in the picture there, too.

“I think it’s just because of the way Jonathan has played lately. I know defensively it was his first flaw yesterday, but we think he’s done a really nice job defensively. That’s why he’s out there again.”

Red Sox break up Nathan Eovaldi, Martin Perez in starting rotation

Bill Koch

The Red Sox have opted to break up Nathan Eovaldi and Martin Perez in their starting rotation.

Eovaldi will pitch Saturday and Perez takes the ball Monday against the Yankees. Both will enter their next outing in the Bronx with an extra day of rest.

“We’ve got two guys who we know are going to start,” Boston manager Ron Roenicke said. “They’ve been giving us length. It is nice to spread those guys out. Both of those reasons are why we’ve done this.”

Colten Brewer drew the start Friday night in what was expected to be a bullpen day. Boston will make a roster move ahead of Sunday’s game and call up a starting pitcher from the alternate site at Pawtucket. Chris Mazza is among those in contention after 2 2/3 solid frames during the first Red Sox trip to the Bronx.

“Our games are that much more important to make sure we win those,” Eovaldi said. “Then we’re asking our bullpen to fill in another big role and try to fill in three games in between there.”

Boston starters aside from Eovaldi and Perez entered Friday night with a 10.45 earned-run average.

Red Sox look to turn the page after Rays sweep

Bill Koch

All the Red Sox can do now is turn the page.

The four-game drilling handed out by the Rays at Fenway Park is over. Boston will be on the road for 11 of its next 13, including the next four against the Yankees in the Bronx.

Thursday’s 17-8 defeat against Tampa Bay included a pair of position players taking the mound in the top of the ninth inning. Jose Peraza was struck on the right knee by a line drive, forcing Kevin Plawecki to ditch his catcher’s gear and record the final two outs.

“Obviously you can’t control what happened already,” Red Sox shortstop Xander Bogaerts said. “Those games are over with. Just try to control what we have going forward. Try to go out there and have some fun.”

Is that possible in this era of pandemic baseball? COVID-19 has stripped the togetherness from clubs like Boston. The home clubhouse has been replaced by suites and road trips include none of the team dinners or other bonding opportunities that existed in the past. There is little chance to truly kick back and refresh away from the field.

“They’re not happy with this losing,” Boston manager Ron Roenicke said. “I still see the effort level. I still see how they prepare going into every single game we play. The attitude, what they talk about before the game – it’s still been good.”

Some have appeared more crestfallen than others. Rafael Devers made three errors Thursday and cast his eyes skyward after one of them, searching to the heavens for an answer. He walked from the dugout to his position in the ninth, a course of action that would generally earn a verbal rebuke from a stern high school or college coach.

“Some guys, it’s not going the way they want to,” Bogaerts said. “It’s been tough. Just got to be there for your teammates at a time like this. If you see their heads down you’ve got to go and remind them that you’re here for them – anything they need.

“You want to see them succeed so bad. It’s also when you see it because you know what these guys are capable of. It’s been rough. Hopefully we can find ways to have fun and that will change.”

* MassLive.com

Boston Red Sox drop to 1-12 at Yankee Stadium since start of last year, have been outscored 52-25 in five straight losses this week

Christopher Smith

One-third of the 2020 season is completed and the Boston Red Sox are a complete mess.

With an 10-3 loss to the Yankees in the Bronx on Friday, the Red Sox dropped to 6-14 (.300 winning percentage). They are on pace to finish this shortened 60-game schedule with a 18-42 record.

Reliever Ryan Brasier retired the first two batters of the fifth inning with the Red Sox trailing 2-1. But he then allowed three straight hits, including Gary Sanchez’s 457-foot two-run homer with an exit velocity of 109.7 mph.

Mixed into the inning was one of the rarest balks you’ll ever see. Brasier faked a throw to first base. He held onto the ball because first baseman Mitch Moreland wasn’t holding on the runner with a 3-2 count and two outs. The runner, Gleyber Torres, would have been off with the pitch anyway in that situation.

Torres, who singled, advanced to second base on the balk and scored on Mike Tauchman’s double. Sanchez then went deep.

J.D. Martinez went 0 for 4 with four strikeouts. Xander Bogaerts went 0-for 4 with three strikeouts.

Boston has lost five straight games, being outscored 52-25. It has been outscored 44-18 in its past four games.

The Red Sox are 1-12 at Yankee Stadium since the beginning of 2018. They are 0-4 there this season.

Verdugo homers off Cole

Alex Verdugo belted his fourth home run of the season. It traveled 375 feet to right field with a 99.9 mph exit velocity off the bat.

Verdugo’s home run was one of just four hits that the Red Sox recorded in 7 innings against Cole.

Cole struck out eight and didn’t walk anyone. He allowed just the one run.

Brewer throws 73 pitches in 2.2 IP

Colten Brewer, who made his first career major league start, threw 73 pitches in 2 ⅔ innings. He allowed two runs (both earned), four hits and three walks while striking out two.

Red Sox starters have a 6.48 ERA (75 innings, 54 earned runs. Incredibly, the Diamondbacks (6.75 ERA) and Tigers (6.78).have higher starter ERAs.

Boston Red Sox embarrassed about allowing 52 runs in 5 straight losses? ‘I’m certainly not going to go there,’ Ron Roenicke says

Christopher Smith

The Boston Red Sox have been outscored 52-25 in five straight losses, including a 10-3 defeat against the Yankees on Friday at Yankee Stadium.

The eight or more runs allowed in the five straight losses ties the longest streak in franchise history, as Boston Globe’s Alex Speier pointed out on Twitter. It had not happened since 1930.

The Red Sox dropped to 6-14 (.300 winning percentage) and are on pace to finish this shortened 60-game schedule with a 18-42 record. Boston is a combined 1-9 against the Yankees and Rays.

Manager Ron Roenicke was asked if this stretch of poor pitching is embarrassing.

“I’m certainly not going to go there,” Roenicke answered. “But yeah, we need to pitch better. Some of it is we’re not making plays when we need to make plays. If we can give some pitchers more outs and give them a chance to extend and get longer in the game. But we need to do everything a little better. We need to pitch better. We need to play better defense. We need to hit better. So we just don’t have it working real well right now.”

Red Sox pitching ranks worst in the major leagues in WHIP (1.65), 28th in ERA (5.86 ERA) and 29th in batting average against (.288).

The Red Sox rank 28th in starter ERA (6.48), last in starter WHIP (1.76) and last in starter batting average against (.297).

Boston’s .731 OPS (on-base percentage + slugging percentage) ranks 20th in the big leagues. The Sox also rank 20th in OPS with runners in scoring position (.763).

Poor defense (six errors during the losing streak) and recent mental mistakes also have led to runs. Another mental mistake happened Friday when reliever Ryan Brasier committed a balk in a 2-1 game during the fifth inning.

Brasier faked a throw to first base. He held onto the baseball because first baseman Mitch Moreland wasn’t holding on the runner with a 3-2 count and two outs. The runner, Gleyber Torres, would have been off with the pitch anyway in that situation.

Moreland informed Brasier he wasn’t holding on the runner.

“Ryan forgot, so (he) threw over to first,” Roenicke said.

Torres, who singled, advanced to second base on the balk and scored on Mike Tauchman’s double. Gary Sanchez then blasted a 457-foot home run.

“It’s obviously concerning. You don’t like the mental mistakes,” Roenicke said. “We can take getting beat. But we don’t want to give it to teams. And every time we do, they capitalize on it. It’s been errors. We make an error and all of a sudden they get a homer. We just do things that are giving teams opportunities to score runs. You try to focus more, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the issue is the focus. I don’t know. Things are just not going well.”

Boston Red Sox ‘obviously don’t have enough pieces right now to compete,’ team chairman Tom Werner says

Chris Cotillo

Appearing on NESN before Friday’s game against the Yankees, Red Sox chairman Tom Werner offered a frank assessment of his struggling club.

Asked by host Tom Caron about the franchise’s plans to rebuild into contenders in the coming years, Werner conceded that the 2020 version of the Red Sox -- who entered Friday with the worst record in the American League at 6-13 -- were unlikely to make a playoff run this summer.

“I hope so,” Werner told Caron. “We expect to field a competitive team each year. We expected to have a good offense, a relentless offense. Even our offense has not clicked the way we would have hoped. We obviously don’t have enough pieces right now to compete.”

The Red Sox are fresh off a four-game sweep at the hands of the Rays that ended with a brutal 17-8 loss in the series finale Thursday afternoon. After taking two of three from the Blue Jays over the weekend, Boston was largely noncompetitive for the entirety of the series against Tampa Bay, allowing 42 runs and 56 hits over four games.

Entering Friday, the Red Sox ranked 27th in baseball with a 5.60 staff ERA. The much-maligned pitching staff has been brutalized for most of the season despite solid performances from starters Nathan Eovaldi and Martin Perez.

“If you’re giving up eight runs a game, you’re not going to be competitive,” Werner said. “We were hoping that some of the pitchers we signed would perform a little bit better. I don’t want to give up on them; this is a short window. But nobody’s very pleased, including the players. I guess if I had to say if there are silver linings, I don’t think the team is quitting. I think they’re approaching each at-bat and each inning very much in focus. It hasn’t been good enough.”

With this year’s trade deadline set for Aug. 31, the Red Sox now have a little over two weeks to decide whether or not to trade some of the club’s veterans whose contracts expire either this season or next. Though the uncertain nature of the 2020 season as a whole makes it unclear how much activity there will be leading up to the deadline, Werner believes the Red Sox could sell some pieces.

“These markets heat up probably a day or two before,” he said. “There’s just a lot of conversations going on. We’re not going to give up on any of our really strong assets, but if somebody can take a piece and it helps them for a few weeks and we can get a long-term, great player out of it, of course we’ll look at it. We’re sort of in the second inning with this.”

Xander Bogaerts thinks Boston Red Sox need to have more fun despite struggles: ‘I feel like good things will happen that way’

Chris Cotillo

Red Sox shortstop Xander Bogaerts isn’t having much fun in 2020.

Bogaerts, the de facto team captain, can’t hang out with his teammates off the field because of social distancing measures put in place to combat the spread of COVID-19. On the field, the Red Sox haven’t had much to be happy about, losing 13 of their first 19 games.

In a season that has proven difficult for the Red Sox in all facets, Bogaerts believes players must find a way to manufacture their own fun on the field. After Boston hit rock bottom with a 17-8 blowout loss to the Rays on Thursday afternoon, the clock is ticking.

“It has been a little hard for us on that part, but we’ve just got to go out and have fun and play like we’re having fun,” Bogaerts said. “I feel like good things will happen that way. Just go out there, enjoy being around each other, even though we’ve got to be social distanced and stuff like that. Just go have fun with each other.”

In previous years, Bogaerts always got to the ballpark early and competed with teammates in dominoes, cards and video games. With Red Sox players now separated in luxury suites instead of a traditional clubhouse at Fenway Park, the time for those types of activities has vanished.

Still, Bogaerts thinks the Red Sox have a responsibility to bond and play as a team.

“The regular stuff you can do hanging around with your guys, you can’t really do that as much now. But we’ve just got to go out there and perform,” he said. “I don’t think playing cards or playing PlayStation has an effect on if you’re going to win or lose. We’ve just got to go out there still and play to our abilities and find ways to have fun.”

Bogaerts has been on bad Red Sox teams before -- the club won 71 games in 2014 and 78 in 2015 -- but said the 2020 struggles are the most challenging because he’s in the middle of them. The Red Sox started with the same 6-13 record in 2019 but had 143 games to climb out of that hole compared to the 41 they have this season.

“This one kind of sucks more because it’s more recent,” he said. “It’s the recent memory and what you’re living in at this moment.”

Bogaerts has struggled at times but has generally been productive in 2020, entering Friday with a .293 average, three homers and 10 RBIs. Other notable players on the team, like Andrew Benintendi and Rafael Devers, have gotten off to putrid starts.

“When you see them with their heads down, you’ve just got to go remind them you’re here for them and anything they need,” Bogaerts said. “You want to see them succeed so bad. It’s also tough for you seeing it because you know what these guys are capable of. It has been rough. We just need to find ways to have fun and hopefully that will change.”

Bogaerts and his teammates have frequently mentioned all the differences that 2020 has brought, from a shortened schedule to a quick summer training camp to the lack of in-game video changing how the club gameplans offensively. But with a third of the season already finished, the shortstop thinks the Red Sox need to start enjoying the day-to-day grind a bit more if they wants to be successful.

“Coming up as a kid, until this year that we’re having, you find different ways to have fun,” he said. “It has been awesome. But this year is a lot different and a lot of adjustments have to be made.”

Jonathan Arauz in mix for Boston Red Sox starting second base job after never playing above Double A before 2020; ‘He’s so confident'

Christopher Smith

Red Sox rookie Jonathan Arauz, who just turned 22 on Aug. 3, is 8 for 14 with a double, four RBIs and two runs in his past four games after going 0 for 9 in his first four major league games. The Rule 5 Draft pick will start at second base Friday against Yankees ace Gerrit Cole at Yankee Stadium.

Second baseman Jose Peraza is out of the lineup after a line drive struck his knee while pitching in a blowout loss against the Rays on Thursday. X-rays returned negative but Peraza will receive the day off to help him recover.

Arauz might have started over Peraza anyway Friday because he has played himself into the mix for regular time at second base.

“That’s why he’s out there. Just because he’s played so well recently,” Red Sox manager Ron Roenicke said. “I think the plan was really at the beginning more (Michael) Chavis and Peraza and how they were doing. And whoever’s playing better we were going to put them out there more often. We know (Tzu-Wei) Lin is still in the picture there, too. But I think just because of the way Jonathan has played lately— and I know defensively was his first flaw yesterday. But we think he’s done a really nice job defensively. And so that’s why he’s out there again.”

Arauz made his first error of the season Thursday. But he’s a slick defender who can play anywhere in the infield. Scouting reports had his defense ahead of his offense entering this year. The offense has been a nice surprise.

“You want to see how a guy reacts when things don’t go well,” Roenicke said. “So we’ll see how he reacts today after making the couple of mistakes (defensively) yesterday.”

Roenicke said he would be surprised if Arauz didn’t react well.

“His makeup, he’s really confident,” Roenicke said. “And he is really talented.”

He never played above Double A until this year. He batted .249 with a .319 on-base percentage, .388 slugging percentage, .707 OPS, 11 homers, 22 doubles, two triples and 55 RBIs in 115 games at High A and Double A in the Astros’ system during 2019.

As a Rule 5 Draft pick, Arauz must remain on Boston’s active roster the entire season (barring an injured list stint) or be offered back to his previous club, the Astros.

“Offensively, he’s doing fantastic,” Roenicke said. “He’s got good hands. He catches up with a good fastball. We thought with Cole throwing as hard as he does, he’s got a chance to catch up with it. And he’s swinging from both sides of the plate.”

The switch hitter is 5 for 13 batting from the right side and 3 for 10 hitting from the left side.

“In Fort Myers, we thought he was calm in all situations,” Roenicke said. “We liked his swing. He did a nice job defensively. We knew he had good hands. ... You can see that his arm is good. So everything he has allows you to think he’s going to do well, except for experience. Because of his makeup, the experience doesn’t seem to bother him that much. Because he’s so confident in what he can do.”

* RedSox.com

Sox's mental miscues 'obviously concerning'

Ian Browne

In this week of mishaps for the Red Sox, they were again hampered by an untimely mistake on Friday night at Yankee Stadium.

For roughly half the contest, Boston stayed right in it, utilizing a bullpen game while the Yankees went with stud righty Gerrit Cole.

With two outs and nobody on in the fifth in this eventual 10-3 loss, Ryan Brasier gave up what could have been a harmless single to Gleyber Torres. Moments later, unaware that Mitch Moreland wasn’t covering first base, Brasier looked over on a potential pickoff throw and wound up balking Torres to second.

“Mitch told him he was behind [the runner] and Ryan forgot, so he threw over to first,” said Red Sox manager Ron Roenicke, a patient man who has to be getting exasperated by his team’s frequent mistakes.

Continuing the other theme of the week, the Red Sox were immediately victimized by the mental error, surrendering three runs in the inning to fall into a 5-1 hole against Cole, who improved to 4-0 this season while lowering his ERA to 2.76.

“No doubt that changed the game,” said Roenicke. “We are close at that point and then we let it get away from us. It’s a really good team. If you let them get away with it where you give them an opening, they usually capitalize.”

The Sox are 0-4 against their rivals this season. But the bigger problem is the past five days, in which sloppy baseball and unreliable pitching have been the culprits in Boston getting outscored 52-25.

“It’s obviously concerning,” said Roenicke. “You don’t like the mental mistakes. We can take getting beat, but we don’t want to give it to teams. Every time we do, they capitalize on it. We make an error and all of a sudden we give up a homer. Just doing things to give teams opportunities to score runs. So, just try to focus more, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the issue, the focus. I don’t know. Things are just not going well.”

That’s an understatement. In this season-high five-game losing streak, the 6-14 Red Sox have had fielding miscues, baserunning mistakes and, the latest, a balk that should have never happened. Boston’s pitchers have allowed at least eight runs in each game of the skid.

“Yeah, you know, it’s tough,” said Red Sox outfielder Alex Verdugo. “I think we’re all competitive, we all want to win, so when the results aren’t there, it’s a little bit tough. But we’ve just got to come out here every day, play hard, just keep throwing the ball, keep hitting, [better] situational hitting and hopefully turn it around.”

At this point, turning it around seems like a daunting proposition.

One-third of the way into this 60-game season, the Red Sox are on pace to go 18-42. The current losing streak is their third this season of four games or more. That is not a formula for making it to the postseason, even in a year in which the field has been increased from five to eight teams per league.

“We know that to go out there and win, it’s going to be hard. We’re going to really have to put together some good wins from all sides of the field,” Verdugo said. “Like I said, it’s just something that it could be as small as [Nathan] Eovaldi coming out there and throwing us five, six innings solid [on Saturday night] and offensively us jumping on [James] Paxton or something.”

There was one bright spot

If you’re looking for a silver lining in Friday’s loss, look no further than Verdugo’s at-bat against Cole in the top of the fourth. With the count 1-1, Verdugo teed off on Cole’s curve and deposited it into the second deck in right field.

Coming off a back injury last season, Verdugo looks more comfortable at the plate with each passing week. He now has four homers on the season.

“I like to take the first pitch through all my at-bats, especially coming into this division and it’s my first time facing a lot of these pitchers,” said Verdugo. “That at-bat, he threw me a curveball that I took for the first pitch and I felt like I saw it well. I felt good on it. I felt good on the take. And then he threw a fastball, I think, outside corner for a strike and it was one of those things, I think my approach at that particular time was really, really good.”

Things were not so good for J.D. Martinez, the slugger who appeared to be finding his groove earlier in the week. In this one, Martinez went 0-for-4 with four strikeouts.

“Chasing,” Roenicke said. “Obviously a great pitcher makes you chase a lot more. So whether it’s a 97 mph fastball or a great slider, curveball, this is a really good pitcher and you have to be on your game in order to have great at-bats against him.”

Xander: Sox need to 'find ways to have fun'

Ian Browne

As the longest-tenured player on the Red Sox, not to mention someone who has strong leadership qualities, Xander Bogaerts has more jobs these days than just hitting the baseball or playing shortstop.

With his team off to a demoralizing 6-13 start in which the pitching has been shaky, the offense has underperformed and the defense has botched too many routine plays, Bogaerts has been encouraging his teammates not to get deflated.

“You just have to be there for your teammates, especially at a time like this,” Bogaerts said. “When you see guys with their heads down, you just have to go and remind them that you’re here for them and anything that they need and you want to see them succeed so bad. It’s also tough for you seeing it because you know what these guys are capable of. It’s been rough. We just have to find ways to have fun and hopefully that’ll change.”

Bogaerts mentioned the word “fun” several times in his Zoom session prior to Friday night’s game at Yankee Stadium -- an obvious indicator that the Red Sox haven’t been having a lot of fun lately.

“Obviously you can’t control what’s happened already. Those games are over with,” Bogaerts said. “Just try to control what we have going forward. Just try to go out there and have some fun. I know it’s been a little hard for us on that part, but we’ve just got to go out there and have fun and play like we’re having fun."

Considering that Bogaerts is a fierce competitor who owns two World Series rings, this start has been especially tough on him. But he was boosted a little bit when a reporter informed him the Red Sox also started 6-13 last year and wound up winning 84 games.

Of course, there are some obvious differences. This Boston team has precious little starting pitching. And this season is 60 games, rather than 162.

“I actually didn’t know that stat,” Bogaerts said. “That’s very encouraging news you’re giving me. So we’re in the same situation. Obviously this year has been a little bit rough, a bit tough for us.

“That’s actually one of the best things I’ve heard this year at this point. Obviously, the record is not as we want it, but we definitely turned it on last year because we finished all right. But this is another year, and it would be nice if we could go on another run like that this year, too.”

Peraza feeling better

Things got so out of hand in Thursday’s 17-8 loss to the Rays that manager Ron Roenicke called in two position players to pitch in the ninth inning. That was because the first one -- infielder José Peraza -- got smoked below the right knee on a liner just three batters into his outing.

Roenicke likely would have kept Peraza out of the lineup anyway on Friday night against nasty Yankees ace righty Gerrit Cole, but he should be fine to start against lefties James Paxton and J.A. Happ on Saturday and Sunday.

“He’s doing good,” said Roenicke. “Thank goodness. That ball really smoked him. I was concerned. But he was actually doing well when I went in after the game, and [I] actually walked off the plane last night right behind him and he wasn’t limping going down the steps, which I was surprised. Little sore today, but they worked on him and he’s actually feeling pretty good.”

Rule 5 Draft pick Jonathan Araúz got the start at second base, and he’s performed well all week, especially at the plate.

“Well that’s why he’s out there, just because he’s played so well recently,” said Roenicke. “I think the plan was really at the beginning [of the season] more Chavis and Peraza [at second base], and [based on] how they were doing, whoever was playing better, we were going to put him out there more often.

“We know [Tzu-Wei] Lin is still going to pitch in there, too. But I think just because of the way Jonathan has played lately … I know [he made his first error yesterday], but we think he’s done a really nice job defensively. That’s why he’s out there again.”

* WEEI.com

Why can't the Red Sox beat the Yankees (or anybody else)?

Rob Bradford

You aren't going to find a louder ballpark than what was on the display in Yankee Stadium Oct. 9, 2018.

Yet with the Yankees' fans bearing down on him in the seventh inning of Game 4 of the American League Division Series, Ryan Brasier cruised through all three New York batters he faced -- Luke Voit, Neil Walker and Gary Sanchez -- setting up the Sox' eventual nail-biting series-clincher.

Flash forward to Friday night.

With the Red Sox entering the home half of the fifth inning and the visitors trailing by just a run, Brasier took the mound. This time there wasn't a peep coming from the stands. Just the reliever against the Yankees' lineup, which in this spot included Aaron Hicks, Gio Urshela and Gleyber Torres. The righty got the first two, no problem. Then Torres singled. Suddenly, out of nowhere the here and the now emerged, making that playoff win seem a lot more than 676 days ago.

Brasier balked, going to throw over to first with Mitch Moreland not manning the bag. Then came the unraveling. A Mike Tauchman RBI double paved the way for Gary Sanchez' two-run homer. The Yankees were on their way to another win over the Red Sox, this one finishing up at 10-3 the favor of the hosts. (For a complete box score, click here.)

"Mitch told him he was behind (the runner) and Ryan forgot, so he threw over to first," Red Sox manager Ron Roenicke said. He added, "No doubt that changed the game We are close at that point and then we let it get away from us. It’s a really good team. If you let them get away with it where you give them an opening, they usually capitalize."

It wasn't the be-all, end-all. But it was a microcosm how things have changed since Eduardo Nunez's throw to an outstretched Steve Pearce narrowly got Torres to finally silence that crowd two seasons ago.

In the last two years, the Yankees have absolutely dominated the Red Sox, winning 18 of the teams' 23 meetings. After Friday night's performance, in which three other Red Sox pitchers (Colten Brewer, Dylan Covey, Brandon Workman) also surrendered two or more runs, the Sox' ERA against New York the last two years stands at 6.78.

It's only worse at Yankee Stadium, where the Red Sox have won just once since the 2018 ALDS, allowing the Yanks a plus-42 in run differential in the 13 games.

As was the case with Gerrit Cole this time around, Yankees pitchers have generally dominated Red Sox hitters during this stretch in the Bronx, holding them to a .212 batting average. It certainly doesn't help matters when the heart of your order, J.D. Martinez, starts 2020 going 1-for-11 with six strikeouts at Yankee Stadium.

In a nutshell, the Yankees have gotten a lot better in the last two seasons and the Red Sox have gotten a lot worse. One has the best record in the American League and the other has the worst. One has invested in pitching staff, the other has resorted to piecing together games literally inning by inning. One has turned the roster over with shrewd pickups (Urshela, Voit, D.J. LeMahieu), the other is trying to figure out life after Mookie Betts.

Let's face it, the Red Sox are having a hard time beating anybody these days. But what makes it worse is knowing the team you ultimately have to leap-frog seems in a completely different stratosphere.

"It’s obviously concerning,” said Roenicke. “You don’t like the mental mistakes. We can take getting beat, but we don’t want to give it to teams. Every time we do, they capitalize on it. We make an error and all of a sudden we give up a homer. Just doing things to give teams opportunities to score runs. So, just try to focus more, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the issue, the focus. I don’t know. Things are just not going well."

* NBC Sports Boston

Mookie Betts is dominating with Dodgers, but trading him remains the right call

John Tomase

There are many reasons to rip the Red Sox, whom I described as a maggoty dumpster fire as recently as Friday.

Trading Mookie Betts isn't one of them.

The former and probably future MVP made history with the Dodgers on Thursday night, delivering the sixth three-homer game of his career and his first outside of Baltimore. (That's a joke, but man, did he murder the Orioles).

With the Red Sox slip-sliding their way to oblivion, the juxtaposition of Betts' monster night with their own demoralizing 17-8 loss to the Tampa Bay Rays was hard to miss, but easy to mischaracterize.

In the short term, oh my God, what a horrific deal. Betts is going to win a World Series and the Red Sox are going down the toilet like a leg-twitching beetle. But in the long-term, the franchise will be better served by moving on from its homegrown star, because Betts' window of dominance did not remotely fit Boston's window of contention.

Perhaps it's just my small-c fiscal conservatism talking, but I am philosophically opposed to 12-year contracts, no matter how talented the player. You're buying more decline years than prime ones, especially in an era when fewer and fewer players maintain production into their 30s, let alone players of Betts' profile.

Five-tool star Grady Sizemore saw his ascension halted at 25. Former NL MVP Andrew McCutchen delivered his last monster season at 28 and his last really good one at 30. Ask the Yankees how they feel about paying Jacoby Ellsbury.

Betts is a generational talent, but he's only 5-foot-9. As we noted over the winter, players that size simply aren't built to last, and if that sounds like some cold-blooded actuary bleep, so be it.

Since 1947, only seven players 5-foot-9 or shorter have compiled a career WAR of 50 or higher (compared to 125 for those 5-foot-10 or taller). Two were catchers (Yogi Berra, Pudge Rodriguez), one was a defensive whiz who couldn't hit a lick (Luis Aparicio), and you tell me what to make of the other four.

Hall of Famer Joe Morgan remained an elite player until age 32, when he won his second MVP Award. He hit .254 over the final eight years of his career. Fellow Hall of Famer Tim Raines made his final All-Star team at 27 and topped 3.5 WAR just twice after age 30. We are already intimately familiar with the career trajectory of Dustin Pedroia.

That leaves Hall of Famer Kirby Puckett, a 5-foot-8 bowling ball who remained a force through his age-35 season before a tragic eye injury ended his career.

Betts is a unique athlete, so maybe he'll break that mold, but I don't blame the Red Sox for deciding not to take the risk. Were they stacked with the kind of talent that could contend right now, and blessed with a deep farm system to augment some of their higher salaries, then I would've made a case for retaining Betts anyway to capitalize on the 27-year-old's prime.

But let's be realistic about this window. There's a reason John Henry and Co. replaced the win-now Dave Dombrowski with the win-someday Chaim Bloom. They saw the team for what it was, married to bad contracts like the oft-injured Nathan Eovaldi and Chris Sale.

They were lucky to get out from under half of David Price's remaining bloat, but now they face the prospect of retooling pretty much every position except catcher (Christian Vazquez), third base (Rafael Devers), shortstop (Xander Bogaerts) and right field (Alex Verdugo). Do I even need to ask what difference Betts would've made on this train wreck?

Assuming Sale returns from Tommy John and Eduardo Rodriguez beats myocarditis, the Red Sox still are woefully inadequate in the pitching department, and after years of being strip-mined by Dombrowski, the once-prized farm system is beginning a long road back to viability.

Trading Betts makes clear their path forward. It provides the financial flexibility to attack multiple deficiencies, because no team boasts a limitless budget, not even Boston. Paying Betts $35 million annually to begin declining just as the Red Sox climbing back into contention would be bad business.

In the meantime, hammer away. Crushing the Red Sox is its own cathartic sport (I've got my varsity letter), and there will undoubtedly be more nights when the Red Sox fall on their face while Betts soars 3,000 miles away.

That doesn't change the calculus that made him a bad long-term investment for Boston, which is why I firmly believe we will eventually look back at his departure as the right call.

* BostonSportsJournal.com

One moment in Friday’s loss encapsulated what’s wrong with Red Sox

Sean McAdam

In the fifth inning Friday night, New York Yankees shortstop Gleyber Torres was on first base with two outs and Michael Tauchman was at the plate.

Ryan Brasier, already the third Red Sox pitcher of the night, was strangely occupied with throwing over to keep Torres close to the bag. In three seasons in the big leagues, Torres has stolen just 11 bases, yet Brasier continued to throw over to first.

Finally, with the count full, first baseman Mitch Moreland stepped back behind the runner to help guard the line against the lefthanded-hitting Tauchman. After all, with two outs and the count full, Torres would be off with the pitch anyway. Moreland signaled his intention to Brasier to play off the bag and behind the runner.

And yet, as he prepared to make the important pitch to Tauchman, Brasier suddenly whirled with the intention of again throwing to first. As he pivoted, however, he spotted Moreland well behind Torres and froze. He was correctly called for a balk, moving Torres 90 feet and into scoring position.

Finally, turning his attention back to Tauchman, Brasier then allowed an opposite-field single to left, allowing Torres to score. Had Torres not been balked to second, he would have been forced to stop at third — at best.

But the bad news was far from over. Next, with Tauchman aboard, Brasier then hung a pitch to Gary Sanchez who blasted in 457 feet, well beyond the bullpen in left center.

In the span of just a handful of pitches, the Red Sox went from trailing the Yankees 2-1 to losing 5-1, en route to yet another blowout loss, 10-3.

It was hard not to think that the entire game has turned on the lapse of focus on the part of Brasier.

“Mitch told him he was behind him and Ryan forgot,” said Ron Roenicke. “It’s obviously concerning. You don’t like the mental mistakes. You don’t like getting beat, but we don’t want to give it to teams. Every time they do, they capitalize on it. If we make an error, then all of a sudden they hit a homer. Or, we’re just giving teams opportunities to score runs.

“We’ll try to focus more but I don’t that necessarily think that’s the issue, the focus. I don’t know. It’s just things are not going well.”

Indeed, they are not. The losing streak has reached five now, and in every one of those losses, the opponent has scored at least eight runs. Much of that is due to a pitching staff that is obviously not major league caliber.

But there have been other distressing signs in the last week. On Thursday, the Sox made four errors, three by third baseman Rafael Devers. None required any extraordinary effort. Instead, they were all on routine throws.

So yes, strictly speaking, they were physical errors. But these weren’t hard-hit balls taking bad hops or clanging off a glove. These were, in essence, lazy bits of execution.

Ironically, hours before Brasier’s mental undoing, Roenicke had told reporters in his pre-game media availability that he was happy with the team’s preparation and commitment, and wasn’t worried about a losing culture developing around the team.

“It’s not at the point now where I really need to address it,” he said, “because I still see how the guys are. They’re not happy with us losing. I still see the effort level. I still see how they prepare going into every single game we play. And the attitude — what they talk about before the game, and it’s still been good.

“They all realize what’s going on. They realize it’s still important to go out and play hard and prepare every day. And they’ve done that. So at this point in time, I don’t think that I need to address that part. I’m just hoping things turn around quickly and hopefully I won’t have to have that conversation.”

No one has been guilty of a lack of effort. The Sox have run out ground balls and, though outclassed, have shown a willingness to play hard.

But the mental lapses have begun to pile up. Earlier this week, Michael Chavis chose to throw home on a play where he had no chance of recording an out. Some baserunning blunders have popped up, with the Sox running into outs they can ill afford.

And that’s the issue here. The Sox are playing with a talent deficit, especially on the mound. The last thing they can afford is to make mental errors that further magnify that gap.

Yet there they were, in the middle of a one-run game, inviting trouble by giving the Yankees additional chances, and inviting questions about focus — or lack thereof — on the field.

BSJ Game Report: Yankees 10, Red Sox 3 – Another one-sided loss extends streak to five

Sean McAdam

HEADLINES

Another lopsided loss: The Red Sox haven’t merely lost five straight games — they’ve been blown out in most of them. Friday marked the fifth straight time that they had given up at least eight runs in a game. In the last five games, they’ve given up an incredible 52 runs, while being held to just 25. The Sox needed six pitchers to get through eight innings and starter Colten Brewer threw 73 pitches while recording just eight outs. The Red Sox never led in the game. True, they were facing one of the best pitchers in the game in Gerrit Cole, but in four of Cole’s seven innings, the Sox went down 1-2-3 and in another inning, they sent just three batters to the plate, thanks to a caught stealing.

Verdugo only one to muster offense: Cole allowed just four hits in his seven innings, but Alex Verdugo made sure that one of them counted, turning on a curveball down-and-in in the fourth inning and golfing it into the second deck in right field to cut into what had been a 2-0 New York lead. It was Verdugo’s fourth homer of the season, tying him for the team lead and extended his hitting streak to five games. Verdugo may not prefer to hit leadoff, but with Andrew Benintendi out for a stretch of time, he’s getting some opportunity, and if nothing else, provides some energy at the top of the order.

Rivalry dead for now: The Red Sox are now 0-4 against the Yankees this season and have lost eight straight at Yankee Stadium dating back to last season. Since the start of the 2019 season, the Red Sox are just 1-12 in the Bronx. “It’s tough,” said Verdugo. “We all want to win and we’re all competitive so when the results aren’t there, it’s a little bit tough.” In the four games played between the teams in 2020, the Red Sox have led for only two innings, total. It was obvious from the start of the season that the talent gap between the longtime rivals was growing in the Yankees’ favor, but the first four meetings have shown that chasm is even wider than expected.

TURNING POINT

A mental mistake by Ryan Brasier with two outs in the fifth paved the way for a big inning for the Yankees, who scored three times to break open what he been a 2-1 game at the time.

ONE UP

Austin Brice: After experiencing his first poor outing the other night against the Rays, Brice rebounded with an inning and a third of scoreless ball in relief of starter Colten Brewer, with three of the four outs coming via strikeouts.

TWO DOWN

J.D. Martinez: Martinez has shown signs of breaking out at home with two homers in the previous four games, but he struck out four times — including three times on just 12 pitches against Gerrit Cole.

Dylan Covey: Covey is trying to earn a more significant role with the staff, but nights like this — two innings, four hits allowed and three runs yielded — aren’t going to help him in that quest.

QUOTE OF NOTE

“I’m certainly not going to go there. But we need to play better.” Ron Roenicke, when asked if the current streak was embarrassing.

STATISTICALLY SPEAKING

Cole won his 20th straight decision, dating back to May of 2019. The four-strikeout game by J.D. Martinez was the seventh of his career. Since the start of 2019, the Red Sox are 5-18 against the Yankees The Red Sox saw their streak of successful replay challenges comes to an end at five when appealing a stolen base by the Yanks.

UP NEXT

The Red Sox and Yankees continue their series at 7:05 p.m. Saturday with RHP Nathan Eovaldi (1-1, 4.09) vs. LHP James Paxton (0-1, 7.84)

* The Athletic

Last year’s Red Sox had optimism after bad start. This year? No such positivity

Chad Jennings

Xander Bogaerts was shocked. Absolutely stunned. He seemed honestly unable to believe what he’d just been told. Was it remotely possible the Red Sox came into Friday’s game with the same record they had at that point last season?

“Really? Yeah? Our first 19 games?” he said. “Shit, I didn’t even know. Then we should be optimistic, you know?”

Of course, that was at 5:30 in the afternoon. By 10:30, it was no longer true.

Friday’s game was another loss. This time, the Red Sox were flummoxed by Gerrit Cole and the Yankees. The final score was 10-3, which wasn’t surprising considering the Yankees were throwing their ace and the Red Sox were using an opener who’d been announced that very morning. Through 20 games — a third of this season — the Red Sox have just six wins and the worst record in the American League. They’ve lost five in a row and would have lost seven in a row if not for walk-off on Sunday.

There’s a reason this season feels so much worse than the team’s disappointing 2019 campaign. It is. The record might not show it much, but it’s worse. The conditions are harder, the odds are longer, the pitching is thinner, and the season is shorter. It’s worse.

Just consider this five-game losing streak.

Monday and Tuesday against the Rays were winnable games into the middle innings — a three-run lead and a one-run deficit — but each one fell apart in the hands of the team’s middle relievers. Five relievers gave up particularly costly runs, and four of them had been designated for assignment within the past year. There was a run-scoring passed ball and a bad baserunning decision in there as well.

Wednesday’s game was one of those when the Baseball Gods seemed hellbent on another Red Sox loss. Michael Chavis got a ball stuck in the webbing of his glove, and Kevin Pillar lost a routine fly ball in the twilight, and those oddities led to three runs. Plus there was another baserunning blunder and another castoff pitcher who didn’t pitch well.

Thursday was a real low point. The Red Sox committed four errors, three of them by Rafael Devers. Marcus Walden allowed six runs without recording an out. First-time starter Kyle Hart was pulled before he could get an out in the third inning. Two different position players had to pitch, and one of them was hit by a line drive. Manager Ron Roenicke called it “sloppy” and “about as bad as it gets.”

Friday was just an old-fashioned drubbing. Cole struck out eight and allowed one run. Martinez and Bogaerts went 0-for-8 with seven strikeouts. Opener Colten Brewer pitched the first two innings scoreless but couldn’t get through the third, then Ryan Brasier balked on a 3-2 pitch in the fifth, which led to an easy run before a massive, deflating two-run homer by Gary Sanchez, who came into the game batting .104 with a strikeout in more than half of his at-bats.

The Red Sox have allowed at least eight runs in each of their past five losses. They’ve allowed 52 runs total during this losing streak. They’ve made baserunning mistakes, lost a flyball in the sky, thrown away easy outs in the infield, seen multiple pitchers fail to record an out in an inning, had their No. 3 hitter strikeout four times in a game, and most recently watched Brasier commit a two-out balk because he forgot the first baseman would not be covering the bag on a full-count pitch. They’ve been bad. They’ve been sloppy. The word embarrassing doesn’t seem too harsh.

“Well, I’m certainly not going to go there,” Roenicke said.

But he conceded that the team’s most recent play has been something short of the expectation.

“It’s obviously concerning,” he said. “You don’t like the mental mistakes. We can take getting beat, but we don’t want to give it to teams. Every time we do, they capitalize on it. We make an error and all of a sudden we give up a homer. Just doing things to give teams opportunities to score runs. So, just try to focus more, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the issue, the focus. I don’t know. Things are just not going well.”

And here’s the difference between this ugly start to a season and last year’s ugly start to a season. When the Red Sox went 6-13 to open last season, they were the defending World Series champions with five established big-league starters and some sense that things would inevitably get better. Beginning with their 20th game, last year’s Red Sox won 16 of their next 22 to pull to three games over .500, only three games out of the division lead.

Is there any sense these Red Sox are about to do that? In their 20th game, Alex Verdugo hit a home run off Cole to make it 2-1 in the fourth inning, and Brasier was one out away from keeping it there in the fifth. Then came the sloppy blunder with the balk, then the weak single to score a run, and then the towering home run. It was all over at that point. Anyone who’s been watching this team knew it. Another long night for the undermanned pitching staff, and another bad game for the last-place team in the American League.

“I think some of it might come from, obviously we know what’s going on,” Verdugo said. “We know we’re not playing to our best, and you see guys pushing. You see guys stressing out a little bit. I’m one of them. So, it’s just, really, everybody kind of needs to just take a deep breath, kind of relax and try to do less.”

Hard to believe doing less would be the answer, but that can’t be any worse than doing more of the same.

Everything about this Red Sox team is embarrassing

Steve Buckley

Let the record show that on Thursday, Aug. 13, 2020, Mookie Betts hit three home runs in the Los Angeles Dodgers’ 11-2 victory over the San Diego Padres.

Let the record further show that on that same Thursday, Aug. 13, 2020, the Boston Red Sox — the team for which Betts starred before being traded to the Dodgers last winter — suffered a humiliating 17-8 loss to the Tampa Bay Rays at Fenway Park.

We aren’t assembled here today to re-litigate Boston’s decision to trade one of the best five-tool players the organization has ever produced. But the two games — Dodgers-Padres and Red Sox-Rays — offer an important reminder that Betts is hustling, hitting and making terrific throws from right field while the Sox are staggering through this shortened season in a manner that suggests they were never invested in it in the first place.

Perhaps that’s unfair. And, Lord knows, we’ve certainly seen some great defensive plays, long home runs (J.D. Martinez hit one over the Monster Seats on Monday night) and the occasional (if you look very closely) decent pitching performance.

But let’s be honest: This team has been a mess all season, and it’s not just the pick-a-name-out-of-a-hat starting pitching that’s causing all the problems. It’s the defense, which has been terrible. And it’s the base running, which has been horribly, embarrassingly bad. But that never seems to bother Sox manager Ron Roenicke, whose go-to response to any question about the team’s latest base-running blunder is to salute the player for being … wait for it, wait for it … aggressive.

Everyone knew the starting pitching was going to be bad. Rick Porcello had moved on to the Mets, David Price had been sent to the Dodgers as part of the Betts deal, and Chris Sale was lost for the season after finally undergoing Tommy John surgery. And then Eduardo Rodriguez, a 19-game winner in 2019, tested positive for COVID-19 and later developed myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle. He, too, has been shut down.

The savvy Red Sox fan came into this season with lowered expectations. There was bound to be the usual Twitter sniping and talk-show caterwauling once the season began and this or that previously unheard-of pitcher tried to record outs. But come on: It was going to be a “bridge year” and everyone knew it. And a “bridge year,” we have learned, is a hip 21st-century euphemism for “our team sucks.”

But here’s something else we all knew going into this season, and it applies to all the professional sports leagues: Some teams were going to seize the moment and some teams were going to go through the motions.

The Red Sox are going through the motions. In fact, they’re barely doing that, since the word “motion,” by definition, means “the action or process of moving or being moved.”

Consider that third baseman Rafael Devers, having already committed three errors in Thursday’s loss to the Rays, was in no hurry to take the field in the ninth inning. According to Julian McWilliams of the Globe, “… Devers was the last infielder to reach his position. He had walked the entire way.”

Now if you take that, and then wrap it up with Roenicke’s pitching selections for the ninth inning, you have a microcosm of everything that has gone wrong with this season. It began with José Peraza moving from shortstop to the mound, and, OK, no problem with that. The Red Sox were trailing 16-5 and had already gone through the customary five pitchers. With an upcoming weekend series against the drooling Yankees, Roenicke opted to finish out the Tampa Bay game with a position player doing the tossing.

But then Peraza took a grounder off the knee, and he had to leave the game. Hey, it happens. So now Roenicke chose to have Kevin Plawecki do the pitching, except he was already in the game as catcher. He trotted off to remove his catcher’s gear so that he could then toe the rubber and take his warm-up tosses, and naturally catcher Christian Vázquez came into the game — except that he played second base. Jonathan Araúz, who had been at second, moved to shortstop. And shortstop Tzu-Wei Lin put on catcher’s gear and moved behind the plate.

Is it rare for a catcher to become the pitcher in the middle of an inning? No, it’s not rare at all! It happens all the time. It happens in Little League. It happens in the Babe Ruth League. But it’s not supposed to happen in Major League Baseball.

In youth baseball, the coach needs to change pitchers, and his next best available pitcher is his catcher because the three best players on any Babe Ruth League team are the pitcher, the shortstop and the catcher. And in many cases they are interchangeable. So the kid who was the catcher takes off his gear and goes to the mound, and the kid who was on the mound goes to shortstop, and the kid who was at shortstop becomes the catcher. I guarantee that anyone who has ever played Little League or Babe Ruth baseball and who is reading this right now is pausing to recall the many times they’ve seen it. Oh, yeahhh … there was that kid from the Lechmere Sales Orioles. He would start the game as catcher, and then pitch as few innings, and then maybe catch again …

If these 2020 Red Sox were even making an attempt to play hustling, heads-up, eyes-on-the-prize baseball, then Roenicke’s decision to move Plawecki from behind the plate to on top of the hill might be looked upon as daring, or plucky, or … something.

Instead, it’s just the 2020 Red Sox being the 2020 Red Sox.

Maybe it all started with the preposterously tone-deaf and stupid decision to move the starting time of night games to 7:30. Great. Games are interminably long as it is, so let’s start them a half-hour later. Way to “grow the game” with the kids, Red Sox.

And then the season began, and soon everyone was growing weary. It has been horrible baseball, played by a team that hasn’t been up for the challenges presented by this streamlined, altered-on-the-fly season.

The offseason can’t get here quickly enough. The Red Sox can then announce the traditional “modest increase” in ticket prices and fans can look forward to 2021.

* The New York Post

Yankees and Gerrit Cole power past Red Sox without Aaron Judge

George A. King III

Three batters into his first taste of the Red Sox as a Yankee, Gerrit Cole sent a loud message without making a sound.

With J.D. Martinez at the plate and two outs in the opening inning, Cole made those in the visitors’ dugout know the Red Sox were in for a long night by making him look ill swinging at a fastball. Three frames later it was an off-speed pitch that turned Martinez’s legs into jelly. Another off-speed pitch in the sixth had the same outcome.

In his fifth start as a Yankee, Cole dominated for seven innings in a 10-3 victory Friday night at Yankee Stadium.

“I think J.D. just had a rough night. I have nothing to say other than we made good pitches to him,’’ Cole said.

For the first time in five starts, Cole said he was on time for his pregame throwing session. With the way he cruised through the Red Sox lineup, Cole might want to make a habit of being on time.

A leadoff homer by Alex Verdugo in the fourth accounted for the only run Cole allowed. He gave up four hits, didn’t issue a walk and fanned eight.

“It was a tight game for a while and we made some pitches when we had to,’’ said Cole, who is 4-0 with a 2.76 ERA. “We were in a good rhythm and the rhythm got better, especially when we got out of the jam in the fifth.’’

With runners on second and third and two outs in the fifth, Cole induced Jonathan Arauz to hit a ground ball to third baseman Gio Urshela that killed the scoring threat. Cole retired the next six batters and left the game.

Cole posted his 20th straight victory to pull into a third-place tie on the all-time list. Carl Hubbell is tops with 24.

The Yankees’ third consecutive win raised their record to 13-6 and was their seventh in a row over the Red Sox.

Cole’s brilliant outing was aided by a lineup that punished the rancid Red Sox pitching staff hours after Aaron Judge, the AL leader in homers (nine) and RBIs (20), landed on the injured list with a strained right calf.

For the second straight game, Gary Sanchez showed a sign that he might be emerging from a season-long slump with a 457-foot home run that reached the left-field bleachers.

“It’s a process,’’ Sanchez said of climbing out of the 5-for-48 (.104) slide he started the game in. “Getting to the point where I feel really good at the plate. It’s not going to happen overnight.’’

Gleyber Torres, another dead bat, went 4-for-4 and drove in two runs.

“Just go to home plate and try to hit pitches I can hit,’’ said Torres, who started the game in a 9-for-56 (.161) dive. “The first couple of weeks I was so excited I was swinging at every pitch the pitcher threw me.’’

Mike Tauchman, who took over in right field for Judge, went 3-for-5 and drove in four runs. Designated hitter Clint Frazier added a two-run double in the eighth.

While the season-high 10 runs made it a laugher in the end, when it was tight, Cole was at his best as a Yankee, which is a big part of the reason Hal Steinbrenner gave the right-hander a nine-year deal worth $324 million. Steinbrenner believes Cole is the stud pitcher who can hurl the Yankees to multiple World Series titles.

Watching him make Martinez look ill at the plate, it was easy to see Steinbrenner’s logic in making sure Cole became a Yankee.

* Associated Press

Cole posts 20th straight regular-season win, Yanks top Bosox

NEW YORK -- Gerrit Cole posted his 20th straight regular-season win, becoming the sixth pitcher to ever reach the mark by throwing seven sharp innings to lead the New York Yankees over the Boston Red Sox 10-3 Friday night.

A noted Yankees fan growing up in Southern California, Cole (4-0) allowed one run and four hits in his first taste of the storied rivalry, albeit in front of empty seats. He struck out eight, walked none and threw 95 pitches.

"It was a tight game for a while," Cole said. "We needed to make some pitches and we did."

Cole, who came within one strike of a win his previous start before getting pulled, moved closer to the all- time record of 24 consecutive victories by Carl Hubbell in 1936-37. Roy Face is next at 22, followed by Roger Clemens, Jake Arrieta and Cole at 20 each.

"Best pitcher in the game and that's what you're seeing," Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. "You're seeing a guy that's great at his craft with elite stuff and the ability to command it."

Cole's only defeat since May 2019 was in the World Series opener last year, when he pitched for Houston and lost to Washington.

Since his last loss in the regular season, Cole is 20-0 with a 1.94 ERA in 27 starts. His 27-game unbeaten streak is tied with Firpo Marberry for the fourth-longest in baseball history. Roger Clemens holds the record with a 30-game unbeaten streak in 1998-99 followed by Kris Medlen and Dave McNally at 28 games apiece.

"That's impressive but it speaks to his consistency and his work ethic," Yankees right fielder Mike Tauchman said.

The Yankees improved to 7-0 at home for the fourth time since 1959 (also 2017, 1998 and 1987). New York also beat Boston for the seventh straight time and is 12-1 at home against the Red Sox since the start of last season.

Gary Sanchez homered for the second straight game and Gleyber Torres had four hits, including a two-run double in the third.

Tauchman drove in four runs and started in right field for Aaron Judge, who landed on the injured list with a mild right calf strain. Clint Frazier also hit a two-run double in the eighth.

DJ LeMahieu had two more hits and ended the night with a .429 average. It was his 69th multihit game as a Yankee and eighth this season.

Alex Verdugo homered for Boston, which lost its fifth straight to fall to 6-14. The Red Sox also lost to the Yankees for the 12th time in the past 13 meetings since July 28, 2019.

Rafael Devers hit an RBI single in the eighth off Jonathan Holder.

J.D. Martinez went 0-for-4 with three of his four strikeouts against Cole.

"Obviously a great pitcher makes you chase a lot more," Boston manager Ron Roenicke said. "Every time I looked up at a strikeout it was on a corner somewhere and it was great stuff. Whether it's 97 fastball or a great slider or a curveball, it's a great pitch."

Boston used Colten Brewer (0-1) as an opener and he allowed two runs and four hits in 2 2/3 innings.

The Yankees took a 2-0 lead third on Torres' double in the third and then added three runs apiece in the fifth and seventh and two runs in the eighth.

TRAINER'S ROOM

Red Sox: Jose Peraza (leg) was held out after getting hit by a grounder while pitching in the ninth inning Thursday in a 17-8 loss to Tampa Bay.

Yankees: Judge's move to the IL was retroactive to Wednesday and Boone is hopeful it will be a short stint. Cole said he didn't notice Judge was missing until the second inning, when he asked Sanchez where Judge was. "Some teammate I am, I guess," Cole said. . INF Thairo Estrada was recalled from the alternate site in Scranton/Wilkes-Barre. . LHP Aroldis Chapman was slated to face hitters at the alternate site but the team did not provide an update.

UP NEXT

Red Sox: RHP Nathan Eovaldi (1-1, 4.09 ERA) starts Saturday. Eovaldi is 1-1 with a 1.95 ERA in eight appearances, including five starts against the Yankees.

Yankees: LHP James Paxton (0-1, 7.84 ERA) starts Saturday. Paxton is 5-1 with a 3.23 ERA in nine career starts against Boston.