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The Boston Red Sox Wednesday, August 5, 2020 * The Boston Globe It’s another four-game skid for Red Sox as late rally at Rays falls short Peter Abraham Nate Eovaldi was working on a two-hit shutout with two outs in the fourth inning against the Tampa Bay Rays on Tuesday night, pitching so well that it appeared he’d go deep into the game, a rarity for a Red Sox starter this season. But Eovaldi recorded only four more outs. A missed call, the quirkiness of Tropicana Field, and some poor pitches led to a 5-1 loss. The 3-8 Red Sox have lost four in a row and are already six games out of first place. Tuesday marked the ninth time in 11 games the Sox allowed five or more runs. “We’re definitely struggling,” Eovaldi said. “Today was a big game. I felt I needed to step up and do a lot better than I did.” The offense was quiet, too. The Sox went into the ninth inning with only five hits before Christian Vazquez, Kevin Pillar, and Jackie Bradley Jr. singled off Ryan Thompson to load the bases with one out. The Rays rushed in closer Nick Anderson. He struck out Jose Peraza and Andrew Benintendi on 11 pitches to end the game. Both went down looking at fastballs. Benintendi was 0 for 5, and is 2 for 29 on the season with one RBI. “No doubt there’s frustration there,” manager Ron Roenicke said. “They know that we’re a better team than that.” Eovaldi had a 1-0 lead with two outs in the fourth and was seemingly out of the inning when he threw a full-count fastball to Yoshi Tsutsugo. Replays showed caught the inside corner of the plate. Umpire Randy Rosenberg called it ball four. “I thought it was close,” Eovaldi said. “I felt like his strike zone was really good tonight. It’s hard for me to tell balls and strikes. I think a lot of them are there and they tend not to be. I’ve got to move on and attack the next batter.” Eovaldi did just that. Joey Wendle swung at a fastball and popped it in foul territory. Third baseman Rafael Devers settled under it, but the ball struck one of the metal catwalks above the field and deflected away. That’s just a foul ball at the Trop. “You’d think that’s a ball we would have caught, but you never know,” Roenicke said. “It certainly changed things. When you’re going good, those things don’t happen that often, and obviously we’re not going good.” Wendle, given a second chance, singled to left field. Hunter Renfroe followed with a two-run double to the gap in right field and the Rays had a 2-1 lead. “It’s definitely frustrating to say the least,” Eovaldi said. Said J.D. Martinez: “That’s Tropicana for you. You never know. It’s a strange place sometimes.” The fifth inning was bad pitching, not bad luck. Eovaldi’s first pitch hit No. 9 hitter Michael Perez. Austin Meadows, playing in his first game of the season following a positive test for coronavirus, followed with a line drive off the wall in right field when Eovaldi left a fastball over the plate. The Sox were slow relaying the ball in and Perez, a catcher, scored from first. Brandon Lowe followed with an RBI single. It was the end of a stretch that saw five out of six Rays reach base off Eovaldi, who allowed four runs on six hits over five innings. “I’ve got to do a better job of turning the page,” Eovaldi said. Red Sox starters have a 7.07 earned run average. As Eovaldi competed against the Rays, the umpire, and the quirkiest ballpark in the majors, Tampa Bay starter Charlie Morton allowed one run on five hits over 5⅔ innings. The 36-year-old righthander struck out five without a walk, liberally working in his curveball with a low-90s fastball. Mitch Moreland homered in the second inning. The Sox should have had a 2-0 lead in the third, when Peraza singled and Martinez doubled to left field. But the ball hopped over the fence for a ground-rule double, sending Peraza back to third. “Huge,” Martinez said of the ill-timed bounce off the artificial turf. “That kind of shows you the way it’s going right now. That ball hooks perfectly and hits off the wall and ricochets and goes over. That’s a run right there, and a big run, too.” Xander Bogaerts had a chance to drive in two, but popped to center field. That was the first of eight consecutive outs recorded by Morton, who had allowed eight runs over nine innings in his first two starts. The final game of the road trip is Wednesday, with Martin Perez facing Ryan Yarbrough. Red Sox are chasing everything, and their offensive approach has unraveled Alex Speier Back-to-back strikeouts looking with the bases loaded to end a game in which the Red Sox lost by four runs? Brutal. Yet somehow, even those final acts of futility did not seem the most fitting emblem of a 5-1 loss to the Rays on Tuesday night at St. Petersburg, Fla. Much earlier in the game, Rafael Devers swung at a Charlie Morton curveball that hit him in the back leg, turning what would have been a trip to first base into a strike. The development proved so absurd that the Red Sox third baseman couldn’t stifle a laugh. Yet rather than a one-off that can be dismissed with a chuckle, such an extreme outcome feels somewhat typical of the 2020 Red Sox — a team whose offensive approach has unraveled. The patience and discipline of recent years, the willingness to build rallies methodically and then cash in with sound approaches in run-scoring situations, has been absent, a pattern that continued as the Red Sox dropped to 3- 8. Perhaps, J.D. Martinez suggested, the hitting culture has been shaken by the new rules governing both in- game access to technology (players do not have access to video during games this year) and the ability for teams to convene at the field hours ahead of time to review video and game plan. The pregame and in-game ability to engage in such conversations, Martinez said, has essentially been eliminated. Martinez, who in past years would spend significant chunks of the game reviewing video of both his at-bats and those of teammates, no longer can engage in such a practice. When he sees a slumping teammate, he can’t run to a clubhouse video setup in search of a tip that might help either himself or another Red Sox player to recalibrate. “It’s kind of everyone on their own,” Martinez said. “Survivor.” Yet the altered dynamics of 2020 only partially explain what’s transpired with the Red Sox offense. During their recent run of perennial contention — mostly with Mookie Betts atop their order — the Red Sox lineup proved relentless. Even against elite pitchers, the team dominated the strike zone and seemingly turned every pitch into a challenge in a way that created a sense of possibility. Team-wide plate discipline typically meant that pitchers had to challenge the team’s hitters. The team wouldn’t chase pitches off the plate, and did damage to those in the strike zone. Those characteristics created the potential for sustained uprisings. To this point in 2020, that hasn’t been the case. On Tuesday night, Rays starter Morton — to be sure, one of the best pitchers in the AL in recent years — navigated through 5⅔ innings while allowing one run. He didn’t issue a single walk — or, perhaps more accurately, the Red Sox didn’t work a single free pass, a now-familiar occurrence. Personnel changes have something to do with the development. Betts — one of the most selective batters in the game, and someone who chases one of the lowest percentage of pitches outside the strike zone every year — is gone. So, too, is Brock Holt, another player who got on base at a high clip and rarely chased. The at-bats that went to those players last year are going to Jose Peraza — who entered Tuesday having swung at an astronomical 52 percent of the pitches he’d seen outside of the strike zone, the third-highest chase rate in the majors — at second base, and Alex Verdugo and Kevin Pillar in right field, both of whom swing at an above-average number of pitches outside the zone. At the same time, Devers has regressed, his swing at the pitch that hit him illuminating a swing-at- everything approach. Entering Tuesday, he’d swung at 45.9 percent of pitches outside of the zone, one of the 10 highest chase rates in the majors. With such performances, the Red Sox have become one of the least disciplined teams in the league. Before Tuesday, they’d chased 34.1 percent of pitches outside the strike zone — the third-highest percentage in the big leagues this year. They’d walked in just 6.9 percent of plate appearances, the third-lowest rate in the game. Add in devastating slumps by Andrew Benintendi — who is walking, but only because he is struggling to put any pitches in play, resulting in more than half of his plate appearances concluding in a walk or strikeout — and Jackie Bradley Jr.

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