Alex Cora gives blunt assessment of Red Sox: "The brand of baseball we're playing is awful"
BOSTON -- Optimistic baseball fans in the region spent the All-Star break envisioning the Red Sox opening the unofficial second half of the season on a tear, thus inspiring chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom to invest in the team before the Aug. 2 trade deadline. What's happened since has obliterated any such visions from dancing in anybody's heads.
The Red Sox were embarrassed on Friday night, to the tune of a 28-5 beating at Fenway Park by the Blue Jays. The Red Sox were held to just one run -- and were instructed to sit down -- in another loss on Saturday, and the Blue Jays completed the sweep with an 8-4 win on Sunday.
As a result, the Red Sox have lost their grip on a playoff spot, now sitting three games behind the Mariners for the third and final wild card spot, with the Guardians sitting between Boston and Seattle at the moment.
After Sunday's loss -- the Red Sox' ninth in their last 10 games -- manager Alex Cora couldn't help but give a blunt assessment of how his team is playing.
"We just gotta play better. It doesn't matter, like the trading deadline or whatever. We're playing .500 baseball. We're back to neutral. We're back to where we were April 8th, right?" Cora said. "So, the brand of baseball we're playing is awful. We're not catching the ball, we're not putting good at-bats, we're not throwing strikes. It is bad. It's really bad right now."
Cora then quickly tried to spin his outlook into a positive one, but it didn't take long for the negatives to come back.
"But, we're talented, and we can turn it around quick. And it starts [Monday]. We've gotta show up [Monday]. We have to show up [Monday] and play good baseball," Cora said. "It starts with Nick [Pivetta] on the mound, good at-bats, grind at-bats, run the bases well, play good defense. I think defensively, we have taken a step back the last 14 days. We were really good defensively early on, and like I said, yeah we've got moving parts, but you've got to slow it down. Catch the ball, throw it to the right base, don't panic out there. It seems like right now, the game speeds up at one point in the game, and it looks horrible."
The Red Sox rank 19th in MLB with a .984 team fielding percentage, they rank 23rd in team ERA at 4.32, and their offense -- which was expected to be their strength -- ranks 11th in MLB in runs per game. As a result, they're 48-48, back at .500 and looking at the playoff picture from the outside.
