When a team lives the kind of existence the Red Sox are currently experiencing, every piece of the puzzle is going to be scrutinized. After Wednesday night's 4-1 loss to the Yankees, that reality only going to be put in bigger and brighter lights.
Sitting six games under .500 on April 23 will do that.
But not helping matters for the Red Sox are all those possible solutions popping up both at Fenway Park and around Major League Baseball.
Take, for instance, White Sox rookie Munetaka Murakami. The first baseman slugged a home run for a fifth straight game Wednesday, launching a 454-foot blast in Arizona. He is a player who signed a two-year, $34 million deal and now has three fewer home runs than the entire Red Sox team.
This might not be the best jumping off point when starting to surface the ones that got away, considering the side of the plate Murakami hits from (left), but all those home runs should leave the Red Sox blushing with some envy.
The same goes for anybody in the organization who took a peek at the Orioles' box score. There, they would have found Pete Alonso - the player the Red Sox decided wasn't worth getting uncomfortable in the free agent market - hitting his third homer of the season.
These days, any reminder of the importance of hitting home runs should send shivers down the already ice-cold backs of the Red Sox. Since April 17, there have been 186 of these reminders. Only one have come courtesy a Sox swing.
There were more might-might-have-been moments Wednesday night.
For instance, Alex Bregman notched three hits, helping lead his new team, the Cubs, to an eighth-straight win. The third baseman is starting to heat up over the past two weeks, hitting .333 with an .808 OPS in his last 12 games.
And then there was what was right in front of the Red Sox at Fenway.
Perhaps it's unfair to surface Max Fried as one of the Red Sox misses, considering that whiff led them to a pretty good Plan B in Garrett Crochet. Since the beginning of last season, the Yankees are 25-13 when Fried pitches, with the lefty totaling a 2.78 ERA. Crochet isn't far off despite his recent struggles, managing a 3.14 ERA with the Red Sox going 25-12 in his starts.
But, still, Fried delivering eight shutout innings in this latest round of Red Sox offensive futility should make it sting just a bit more than usual.
Even two players who never even took the field for the Yankees on Wednesday could be perceived as adding fuel to this growing bonfire of vitriol: Ben Rice and Cam Schittler.
Both are Massachusetts kids who went to college in New England, and both slipped away to the Yankees. Rice is having a breakout year, totaling the second-highest OPS in baseball (1.198), while Schlitter enters his Thursday night start against the Red Sox having dominated through his first five starts of 2026 (1.95 ERA).
Rice was plucked out of Dartmouth in the 11th round of the 2021 MLB Draft, 17 spots after the Red Sox took Christopher Troye, who isn't currently pitching in professional baseball. Perhaps even more painful was Schlitter going in the seventh round of the 2022 Draft after starring at Northeastern, ONE spot after the Sox took Caleb Bolden. Bolden was another fourth-year college player who signed for just $7,500. The 27-year-old is currently pitching out of the Portland Sea Dogs bullpen.
Maybe everything turns, and the Red Sox are the ones with the players other teams envy. But right now? That's a tough sell.
