Justin Slaten offers insight to his past, present and future
It was a tough look for the Red Sox, to be sure.
Thanks to a 7-5 defeat at the hands of the Diamondbacks, they were swept in a series for the fifth time this season, three of them coming at Fenway Park. This time it also marked the seventh straight Tanner Houck start that the Sox came out on the losing end.
In a nutshell, against the hottest team in baseball - with Arizona now having gone 20-5 since the trade deadline - the Red Sox needed to bring the best version of themselves. They didn't. Far from it.
"I mean, we've been playing a lot of good teams," said Red Sox manager Alex Cora. "We’ve beat good teams over the week. We went to Baltimore split with them and we went to Houston and won the series, they played better than us in this one."
"It’s very frustrating. We knew we had our handful with them," added Red Sox first baseman Triston Casas. "They have been playing amazing baseball since the break. They are a million and zero right now since the break and I can see why."
If the Red Sox want to chalk the last three games up to something along the lines of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, that's certainly their prerogative. But not comes the time and place where the rubber is meeting the road.
They are 4 1/2 games in back of both the Royals and Twins for a Wild Card spot with 33 games to play. The discomfort of coming out of the All-Star break with a depleted bullpen, and then having to face a gauntlet of postseason contenders is all in the rearview.
The Red Sox' opportunity to define themselves is now officially staring them in the face.
It starts with five against a Blue Jays team is five games under .500 but has won four straight, feasting on the Angels in their four-game set. Then comes Detroit, a club that is one-game under .500 but has claimed three straight victories and won 10 of their last 13.
After a three-game visit to see the Mets at Citi Field, the Red Sox get the three-game gift of hosting the White Sox. That brings Cora's club to Sept. 9. By then - with the Orioles, Yankees, and Twins looming - the Sox need to have found their way back into Wild Card World, having made the memory of this weekend an inconsequential bump in the road.
The blueprint to arrive at that point isn't just about the records of their opponents. It will be about finding defining moments for their starters, something that didn't come to fruition in any of the three games against the Diamondbacks. It will be about not squandering four-run leads, as was the case Sunday thanks to three runs by the Diamondbacks in both the fifth and sixth innings. And it will be not giving away runs via baserunning miscues or ill-advised defensive decisions.
The Fangraphs postseason odds aren't screaming optimism for the Red Sox, with the Twins (90.2 percent) and Royals (80.1 percent) making Boston's 24.3 percent seem a fairly impossible hill to climb.
But there is a chance. The Marlins' sat at 22.4 percent this time last year before making the postseason. And, as Cora mentioned, other than these three vs. Arizona the Red Sox have shown the ability to hang with the big boys when at near full-strength.
This is the stretch they were waiting for. Now they are going to find out if it was worth the wait.
"Come back tomorrow, get to work, keep playing," Houck said. "Got about a month and a half still, so just keep going out there, play hard each and every day and show up and get your work in and just keep going. Just keep plugging away at this."
"We lost three games," Cora said. "We got to show up (Monday), we got two. So we got to turn the page like we have been doing all season and be ready for (Monday)."