The 2023 Boston Red Sox have done a great job of playing either really well or really poorly for about a week, only to do the exact opposite the following week.
Alex Cora knows that trend is going to need to change if they want to make the playoffs.
Boston has been a .500 team pretty much the entire season. They’ll go on runs where they’ll dip a ways above or below equilibrium, but they always seem to land right back around that .500 mark.
They sit at 43-43 entering Wednesday’s games. They dropped the opener to Texas on Tuesday after sweeping the Blue Jays over the weekend. Prior to beating Toronto, the Red Sox had gotten swept by the Marlins and dropped two of three to the White Sox.
Because they always seem to rebound after things head south, the Red Sox do remain in striking distance of a playoff spot. Their 13-game deficit to Tampa makes winning the division all but impossible, but they sit just five games out of a wild card spot.
A trip to the playoffs in 2023 is conceivable, but some trends are going to have to change.
“Yeah (the playoffs are still in reach), but we’ve got to start picking it up,” Cora said Wednesday in his weekly appearance on Gresh & Fauria. “Obviously, everybody looks at the wild card and more teams making it to the playoffs, but at one point you’ve got to start making a move. If you sit at .500, it’s going to be hard, right? I think right now we’re four, five games back from the last wild card spot. Is it a lot? No. Is it attainable? Of course, yes. But I think we have to be more consistent.
“Maintaining the winning streaks, going into that run of winning 15 out of 20, I think every team in the big leagues, they have that. At one point, you’ll win seven, you’re going to win eight, but we have to be more consistent with that. So far, we haven’t.”
Five games back of the wild card isn’t insurmountable, but it is a tall task. The Orioles, Astros and Yankees hold the three wild card spots. Toronto (2 games back) and Los Angeles (4) are ahead of Boston in the wild card standings, while Seattle (5) and Cleveland (5.5) are right at or just about even.
It’s one thing for the Red Sox to get hot, which they need to do no matter what happens around them, but they also need quite a few teams to flame out. To Cora's point, that's not impossible, but it means his team needs to kick it into gear sooner than later.
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