Pitching question marks are piling up for Red Sox

For the vast majority of this season, pitching was the Red Sox' biggest strength. It will need to be again if they're going to make any noise in the playoffs. At the moment, however, pitching has suddenly turned into one big question mark.

For the fifth straight game, the Red Sox surrendered eight or more runs Wednesday afternoon, falling 8-3 in the rubber game of their three-game series against the Mariners. They've lost four of those five games, and six of their last eight overall. Their team ERA over their last 15 games is 5.07, which ranks 25th in the majors.

On Wednesday, it was Patrick Sandoval's turn to struggle. After a perfect first two innings, the veteran collapsed in the third and got knocked around for four runs (three earned). Ultimately, he lasted just one batter into the fifth before getting pulled. Command was his biggest problem, as he threw just 40 of his 80 pitches for strikes.

Sandoval was solid his previous two outings, but inefficiency has been a problem since his return in July. Even as he's been stretched out to 90-plus pitches in several starts, he has only completed six innings in one of his 10 starts this season.

Next up was Brayan Bello, who struggled for a second straight outing after a lengthy run of dominance as a reliever. Like Sandoval before him, Bello succumbed to a four-run inning of his own in the sixth, allowing the first six batters of the inning to all reach – four on hits, one on a walk, and one on a hit-by-pitch.

It was the second straight appearance in which Bello allowed four runs, suddenly raising questions once again about just how much the Red Sox can really rely on him in important, close games.

Tuesday's Jedixson Paez disaster can be chalked up as an aberration and a necessary evil on one hand. On the other hand, it also served to highlight that the Red Sox are thin on fill-in options if they want to manage the workloads of any of their five regular starters down the stretch – which is what they did with Sonny Gray by pushing his start from Tuesday to Saturday.

And while setting themselves up for the playoffs is a worthy cause, it wasn't exactly comforting to hear Red Sox interim manager Chad Tracy say Tuesday night that pushing Gray back was "necessary" rather than optional. It was yet another reminder that there's just no margin for error with this rotation if Gray or anyone else were to end up dealing with anything that might cost them more than a few days.

The Red Sox still have a 6-game lead in the wild card race. They have a 96.9% chance to make the playoffs, according to Fangraphs. But they're not 100% locked in yet, and they'd certainly like to get their pitching back on track sooner rather than later.