BOSTON — How to sum up the 2023 Red Sox in one word?
Squander.
It’s not that they don’t have opportunities, it’s that they’re not seizing them. They pass up free passes, and load the bases just to leave them that way. It’s gotten progressively worse all season. After averaging 6.6 left on base per game in April (29 games) and 6.8 in May (26 G), they’re up to 7.8 over 13 games this month.
Their inability to capitalize reached new heights on Tuesday night, as they were forced to do something a Red Sox team hadn’t done since May 1996: Go to extra innings three days in a row.
(They’d also played three extra-inning games in a row in June 2000, but not on consecutive days.)
And for the second night in a row, the Red Sox lost to the Colorado Rockies by one run in the 10th inning (7-6).
Making his third start of the month after working out off the bullpen since mid-April, Kutter Crawford allowed four earned runs on five hits, walked three, and struck out five.
After getting off to a solid start, the pitcher ended up lasting just four innings. He faced four batters in the first and got them 1-2-3 in the second before things unraveled.
In general, starting pitching hasn’t been the problem. Entering the contest, the rotation owned the fourth-best ERA in the majors (3.42) since May 17, with two earned runs or fewer allowed in 18 of their last 24 games.
In other words, the Red Sox have been wasting strong starts for weeks, and Tuesday night was no different at first. In the first three innings, they’d collected one hit, a two-out single by Triston Casas.
Perhaps a night off from playing defense was what Casas needed. He reached base safely in each of his first two at-bats, showing patience in a pair of two-out situations. His fourth-inning walk was his 34th of the season, the most on the roster and tied for the sixth in the American League.
After three scoreless innings, the Red Sox showed some life. In the fourth, Justin Turner got on with a single, and Rafael Devers dinged one off the Pesky Pole for a two-run homer. It was the first Red Sox home run with at least one runner on base since the first of the month. Devers has now homered in three of his last five games, and that’s about the best thing there is to say about this offense.
The home team plated another run in the fifth and tied things up in the sixth, snapping a six-game streak of scoring no more than three runs.
Still, their biggest problem persisted. Faced with opportunities to add on, the Red Sox withered on the vine. As Joe Jacques, Corey Kluber, and Chris Martin combined for five shutout innings, their teammates shut themselves out, too. The Boston bats left the bases loaded in the seventh, squandered a leadoff walk and two stolen bases by pinch-speedster Jarren Duran in the eighth, and went 1-2-3 in the ninth to send the game into extra innings for the third night in a row.
Lo and behold, all those wasted baserunners came back to bite them as soon as they headed to extras. Justin Garza began the 10th inning by issuing a walk, then gave up a two-RBI go-ahead double. After not scoring since the fourth inning, the Rockies were suddenly up 6-4. They’d add one more for good measure before it was Boston’s turn to bat.
Devers was determined not to go quietly into the humid night. He led off with his second two-run homer of the contest. Once again, the Red Sox were within one.
And then, with a pop-up and strikeout, they were done.
Is this kind of loss deflating?
“From my end, no,” manager Alex Cora said. “Just gotta play well, that’s it. Obviously, yesterday we didn’t play well. Today we played OK.”
As evidenced by their record (33-35) and standing (last place), “OK” doesn’t cut it.
It’s becoming clear that the Red Sox are their own worst enemy this season. Often, they’re not losing to their opponents so much as to themselves. They’re not getting no-hit or facing Cy Young pitchers every night; they get chances and waste them.
Unfortunately, there’s no magic fix for this problem. Clutch hitters don’t grow on trees, they’re needles in haystacks. The Red Sox will either figure out how to get out of their own way or take themselves out of contention altogether.