Cora: Red Sox's effort 'embarrassing'

BOSTON -- “E” didn’t just stand for errors on a Saturday night in which the reeling Red Sox made five of them in an ugly 10-1 loss to the Rangers.

“Embarrassing is the word,” said Red Sox manager Alex Cora. “It starts from me. Five errors. We didn’t run the bases well, we didn’t put good at-bats [together], we didn’t pitch. I think in this thing, it’s a team effort. It starts with us, with the coaches, to keep coaching, and we’ve been playing sloppy ball for a while. They keep doing it. At one point, we’ve got to be accountable too.”

Cora was clearly steamed after watching his team slip to 7-15 since July 30, and it was hard to blame him after a performance like this.

He went back to the “E” word again, and added in some other doozies in perhaps his most pointed postgame press conference in the three seasons he’s managed the Red Sox.

The disjointed defeat against the 43-80 Rangers came the day after Chris Sale stifled Texas, 6-0, in his second start back from Tommy John surgery.

“That was embarrassing today. It’s not acceptable. For a team that is fighting for the playoffs, to show up like that and play like that, it doesn’t matter if you win or lose a game,” Cora said. “It’s how you win or lose the game. That’s not acceptable. We played a good baseball game yesterday, and today was awful. That was a bad game.”

It’s hard to fathom things could spiral downward so quickly for a Boston team that was 63-40 on July 28, and led the American League East by 4 1/2 games on July 5.

After playing their worst all-around game in 2021, the third-place Sox slipped to 6 1/2 games behind the Rays in the division and remain a half-game behind Oakland for the second AL Wild Card spot. The Red Sox, who led the Yankees by 10 1/2 games in early July, now trail their rivals by 2 1/2 games for the first Wild Card spot.

“I know what we have in front of us, and we’ve got to get better. It’s a total team effort, organizational effort,” Cora said. “This is not, you know, [pointing fingers to] that guy, this guy, whatever. It’s everybody in the same boat. We put ourselves in a position to make the playoffs, and we still have a chance to make the playoffs. Obviously we have to be better. We have to start now.”

While the Red Sox have struggled at times in all areas in recent weeks, Saturday was the game they didn’t do anything well.

It started with Eduardo Rodriguez, whose perplexingly inconsistent season (9-7, 5.19 ERA) took another downward turn, as he couldn’t make it out of the fourth inning.

“There’s not much to talk about [with] him,” Cora said. “You saw what happened. He wasn’t able to put people away. He didn’t give us enough innings for us to win the game.”

Rodriguez's night turned south on a 67.1-mph grounder back to the box by Brock Holt. Before Rodriguez could field it, it hit him on the left foot and caromed into right field. Instead of being out of the fourth inning down just 2-1, a run scored on that hit and an error ensued from Kiké Hernández, allowing Holt to get all the way to third.

One pitch later, Isiah Kiner-Falefa belted an RBI double, and Rodriguez was out of the game. The Rangers scored three in the inning, and the Red Sox never recovered. Instead, they unraveled.

“I just say, it’s embarrassing the way I pitched today,” Rodriguez said. “Everything was missing with my pitches, location-wise and everything.”

Before the night fell apart on Rodriguez, the Red Sox short-circuited their offense by running into two outs on the bases. The Sox didn’t score after the third inning. The Rangers outhit them, 17-5. Yes, the Red Sox had the same amount of hits as errors.

The bats were stifled by a middling pitcher in Rangers righty Jordan Lyles, who has a 5.23 ERA in 282 career appearances.

How do the Red Sox fix all that ails them?

“It’s 100 percent up to the players,” Rodriguez said. “We’re the ones who go out there and play every day. [Cora is] just the manager. He’s just managing the lineup. I think it’s up to us. Pitchers, position players, hitters. It’s up to us to change the way we played today and the last couple weeks. It’s 100 percent up to us.”

Can they do it?

“One hundred percent,” Rodriguez said. “We still have [37] games to go. If we win all those games, we’ll be in the playoffs. I think 100 percent we can.”

That optimism likely didn’t help Cora sleep any better on Saturday night.

“We deserve what happened today on the field,” Cora said.