Getting hyped up for the World Baseball Classic
It is Alex Cora's job to push all the right buttons, and most of the time his senses are keen. Panic? Nope. It's a long season. Struggles? Stay the course. It's just a bump in the road.
It's why when Cora offers up such pointed analysis as he did following the Red Sox' 16-1 loss to the Rays at Steinbrenner Field in Tampa, it should be noted.
It is an approach and tone the Red Sox manager rarely breaks out, particularly this early in the season. The last time? Maybe during the Sox' lackluster start to the 2019 season when his team was sleepwalking through its 11-game, season-opening road trip.
And, in the case six years ago, that poor play manifested itself in digging the Red Sox hole in the American League East. No such hole has been dug in this case, although it certainly feels like a team that is piling dirt upon themselves.
This 8-10 start feels different than 2024 (9-9), 2023 (9-9), or 2022 (7-11), and Cora knows it. Why? Because this team has expectations the likes of which hasn't been in place since that 2019 campaign.
"It seems like there was a team [in the Rays] that was prepared for the other one. The other one wasn't prepared for them," Cora told reporters. "And that goes from the top all the way to the bottom. That wasn't a good night for us. I'll take the blame, because it seemed like our team wasn't ready to go."
It has been striking how few times the Red Sox - with all their investments and additions - have looked like the more feared club on the field. Their current run-differential is minus-15, the third-worst in the American League. They have lost six of their last eight games. And since their series sweep of St. Louis, the Sox have managed just 15 runs in that eight-game stretch.
"The defense has been bad," Cora added in his meeting with the media. "The offense has been bad. We’ve been inconsistent pitching-wise. Those are the three pillars of baseball, and we haven't been good."
Using the four games against the Blue Jays, three vs. the White Sox and series-opener at Tampa, the picture isn't hard to paint. It is a run of games where the Sox have landed with a .535 OPS, .204 batting average and 83 strikeotus (which is 12 more than any other team in baseball). There have also been just two home runs.
The defense? No MLB club has made as many errors over the timespan of the eight games than the Red Sox (12).
And while the pitching has offered glimpses of what the Red Sox expected, the red flags that have been raised are difficult to ignore, with Tanner Houck perhaps representing the biggest concern.
The 2024 American League All-Star experienced one of those wheels-off-the-cart games he often has at least once in spring training facilities, giving up 12 runs on 10 hits in 2 1/3 innings. The problem this time around was that this came in April and the game actually counted.
Houck is just one of the pieces of the Red Sox' perceived foundation that had paved the way to the aforementioned expectations. Triston Casas was supposed to be a power-hitting presence in the cleanup spot but instead is hitting .175 with a .523 OPS and one home run while striking out 18 times in his 16 games.
Casas isn't alone in his inability to hit the ground running. Rafael Devers (.681 OPS, HR), Jarren Duran (.581) and Ceddanne Rafaela (.551) have also been more of the problem than the solution in this early-going.
So, how do the Red Sox fix things? Maybe it's the wake-up call Monday night - during and after the game - delivered.
This we do know: Shaking this sort of feeling 18 games into the season was not part of the plan.