Sale was unlucky, but Red Sox deserved to lose Monday

Sep. 7—BOSTON — Suppose you were out enjoying your Labor Day and didn't catch the Red Sox 11-10 loss to the Rays. You get back in, check your phone and wait, what happened?

The Red Sox played like they had Labor Day off, that's what happened.

Thanks to a combination of wretched defense and terrible luck, the Red Sox squandered a prime opportunity to overtake the Yankees in the AL Wild Card standings. The Red Sox committed four errors, allowed 19 hits, had several other costly miscues and flat out couldn't finish a game they at one point led by six runs.

"It was a great bad game, right? All the way to the last hitter," Red Sox manager Alex Cora said afterwards. "It wasn't great as far as throwing to the bases, backing up guys, putting guys away. It's great that we had a chance to tie the game or win it at the end but at the same time you can't give a big league team more than 27 outs, and we did."

Early on the trouble was mostly luck, and starter Chris Sale was the biggest victim. On paper it wouldn't seem like Sale had it, as he lasted just 3.2 innings, allowing five runs (only one earned) with 10 hits and a walk along with six strikeouts.

But of the 10 hits Sale surrendered, seven had an expected batting average of .300 or less, meaning they all would have normally resulted in an out at least seven out of 10 times. Five of those came on weakly hit infield singles, three of which effectively bounced off the plate and managed to stay fair and out of the reach of the nearest fielder.

But Sale's bad luck was also a product of his own team's inability to make routine plays. In the fourth inning he should have escaped a bases loaded jam with a 7-1 lead after forcing a routine fly ball to center, but Alex Verdugo lost the ball in the sun, allowing all three runners to score, and Taylor Motter's bad relay throw wound up in the stands, allowing Cruz to come home as well.

Things only got worse from there.

Another error by Motter in the seventh eventually allowed another run to score, Nelson Cruz took Adam Ottavino deep in the eighth, and with the Red Sox leading by one in the top of the ninth Verdugo and the outfield misplayed a deep ball off the centerfield wall that allowed Austin Meadows to tie the game on an inside the park home run.

From there the Rays took the lead in the top of the 10th and survived a bases-loaded jam in the bottom of the inning to close out the win after 4 hours and 54 minutes of excruciating baseball.

"There's no doubt this was definitely a weird one, a tough pill to swallow at the end of the day," Sale said. "Bounces didn't go our way, we got a little unlucky, we didn't help ourselves a lot, but in the end against a team like that we still gave ourself a chance to win that game. We should have pulled through obviously but we fought to the very end."

By losing Monday the Red Sox failed to reclaim the top spot in the AL Wild Card race from the Yankees, who were blanked 8-0 by the Blue Jays and have now gone 2-7 since the end of their 13-game winning streak. Boston, meanwhile, had won four of five despite missing close to a third of the club's big league roster to COVID-19 and seemed to be building some serious September momentum.

The Red Sox will have to hope Monday's Triple-A performance wasn't a harbinger of trouble to come.

Email: mcerullo@northofboston.com. Twitter: @MacCerullo.