Rays 12, Red Sox 6: The tribulations of Eduardo Nunez, second baseman

Eduardo Nunez is the kind of player you should want on your team. He showed that with Red Sox last year, which was the reason he's back, knee problems and all.

Playing second base on a regular basis, however? That's looking more and more like a square peg in a round hole.

Nunez is a guy whose good intentions and hustle are unquestioned. He's a guy who a team should be more than happy to have at the plate in the most important of scenarios. Clubhouse? He gets it. But Saturday's 12-6 Red Sox loss to the Rays offered a few more examples of why he might be miscast in his current role as Dustin Pedroia's replacement. (For a complete recap, click here.)

The most notable moment for Nunez came with two outs and the game tied at 5-5 in the sixth inning. That was when the second baseman charged in on Matt Duffy's slow roller and fired it wide of first baseman Hanley Ramirez, allowing Adeiny Hechavarria to come in from second to give Tampa Bay a lead it wouldn't relinguish. (Can you believe the Rays have now won eight in a row?)

#Rays @ #RedSoxHechavarria scores on an error (00:44)MLB Gameday: https://t.co/Z5Lq2wGUrk pic.twitter.com/TUGm6nEYpM

"I make an error. No excuse," Nunez said. "Bad throw. That's it."

Red Sox manager Alex Cora has consistently stood by Nunez playing second base, a position he manned just 12 games in the 5 1/2 seasons prior to joining the Red Sox. There have been no defensive replacements, and there has been a sense from the player and his skipper that the uneasiness will be subsiding.

"I feel comfortable," Nunez said when asked about how he felt playing second base, where he spent 213 1/3 innings while filling in for Pedroia a season ago. And does he feel better about the spot than when he kicked off the season a few weeks ago? "Yes. For sure," he said.

But to be sure, this is a work in progress. Continued improvement with Nunez's ailing knee would certaintly help matters. But so would confidence in playing his most unfamiliar infield position, which is something Cora did his best to offer a big dose of after the errant throw.

"We talk about that play with Duffy, it's one of those, as an infielder, you want to make a play, that's it," Cora said. "If it's a good throw, it's a bang-bang play at first. He came up to me, 'What do you think about it?' I said, 'Hey, you felt like you had a chance to make a play to get the out, it's like, yeah, so, go for it.' It's just a matter of he made a bad throw. ... I can live with the effort on the Duffy play. Heath [Hembree> made a great pitch, it was a bang-bang play, a do-or-die play and he didn't make it."

"I asked him if he was playing what are you going to decide," Nunez said of his conversation with Cora. "If he would go forward with two outs, on a close play but you think he's going to be out? Or would he save the ball for the next at-bat? He said, 'No, you have to go forward. Errors are part of the game and you're never going to assume you are going to make an error. You are always going to assume you are going to have a good throw. So never save the ball and go forward all the time.' I'm an aggressive player and that's what happened."

The defensive metrics for Nunez aren't great, with the Sox infielder heading into Saturday's game with a minus-3 in runs saved. (For more analytics, click here.) But he doesn't have to be great, just good enough. Saturday showed the third baseman-turned-second basemen needs to be better.