The other day White Sox manager Tony La Russa offered a unique way to explain away the frustrations of his underachieving club.
"At some point, your skin has to get tough," he noted. "You have to have scabs. It’s been rough enough. You don’t walk through the season, show up in October and not have any scars. We keep our toughness going; this is putting stuff in the bank that will pay off later."
Alex Cora, it seems, is taking a bit different tact.
The Red Sox manager had no more time for scabs, scars or any other injury-related metaphors. This is about the here and the now for Cora's club, and the here is from the picture the health.
In other words, even with all their injuries, the Red Sox shouldn't be experiencing the kind of pain that came with dropping a 4-1 decision to the Rays at Tropicana Field Wednesday night.
Sure, the Red Sox are currently a Wild Card team - deadlocked with Toronto and Seattle for the final spot with the Orioles now just two games back. But this is a team that has lost seven of 10, three in a row and is simply playing bad baseball against the teams they are being judged against.
"We're not playing good baseball right now," Cora told reporters. "It's a lot of mistakes and it's costing us games. We need to start playing better baseball if we want to be the team we envisioned in Spring Training."
The manager added, "There's a lot of moving parts but they've (the Rays) got a lot of moving parts, they have a lot of injuries and they keep playing. They play 27 outs and they're playing good baseball and they're pitching and they're hustling and that's why they keep winning."
From @nesn pic.twitter.com/1DGsIddxV4
— Red Sox Stats (@redsoxstats) July 14, 2022
The latest microcosm when it comes to the Red Sox' frustration came when Tampa Bay's Josh Lowe was able to score from first on a seeing-eye single to right field. The run was made possible by right fielder's Rob Refsnyder's initial indecision charging in on the Yandy Diaz grounder, and then subsequent confusion as to where he should throw the ball.
"Yeah, I mean, completely my fault, just a bad play," Refsnyder told MLB.com. "I'm still pretty frustrated about it. Yeah, I mean, I take full responsibility for it. Yandy hit a hard ground ball, Jeter [Downs] dove for it, the runner was going to third on the play, I picked it up and I kind of lost track of where Bogey was, so as I was running in, I was trying to find him."
Nightly embarrassment pic.twitter.com/X08YFKJKra
— Red Sox Stats (@redsoxstats) July 14, 2022
Sure, Chris Sale is back and Nathan Eovaldi and Garrett Whitlock aren't far behind them. But the vim and vigor found with this team a couple of weeks ago has left the building at just the wrong time, having test themselves against the division's iron in St. Petersburg and the Bronx.
"We had a great weekend, I'm not going to blast them," Cora told reporters. "But you have to keep playing. Like I said, nobody is going to feel sorry for your injuries or whatever. You have to show up every day and we've been very sloppy lately and we've got to get better."
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