Cora: 'We're not playing good baseball right now'

ST. PETERSBURG -- Of late, things have been exasperating for the Red Sox, because they are making life too hard for themselves with sloppy defense and baserunning.

Wednesday's 4-1 loss to the Rays marked the second straight night the Red Sox left the ballpark stewing over mental mistakes.

Given that the Sox are amid a stretch in which they are beat up by injuries and have lost 11 out of 16, lack of execution could not be happening at a worse time.

"We're not playing good baseball right now," said Red Sox manager Alex Cora. "It's a lot of mistakes and it's costing us games. We need to start playing better baseball if we want to be the team we envisioned in Spring Training."

The moment that symbolized the recent frustration took place in the bottom of the seventh inning when Tampa Bay's Josh Lowe scored from first on a one-out single through the hole at second base and into right field by Yandy Díaz.

No, that's not a misprint. Lowe scored from first on a single to make it 4-1, Rays. How did it happen?

Right fielder Rob Refsnyder fielded the ball and hesitated before making an indecisive lob back to the infield and it bounced and got away from cutoff man Xander Bogaerts.

Rays third-base coach Rodney Linares never took his eye off the play and immediately had Lowe running home. There was no error on the play. At least not one the official scorer could tag anyone with.

"Yeah, I mean, completely my fault, just a bad play," said Refsnyder. "I'm still pretty frustrated about it. Yeah, I mean, I take full responsibility for it. Yandy hit a hard ground ball, Jeter [Downs] dove for it, the runner was going to third on the play, I picked it up and I kind of lost track of where Bogey was, so as I was running in, I was trying to find him."

Lowe and Linares deserve credit for forcing the action. For a Tampa Bay team that leads the Majors by making 44 outs on the bases, this play was satisfying to pull off.

"I was stealing on the pitch, and Yandy's a really good hitter," said Lowe. "Found the hole. Thankfully I was able to look up and see the ball was in right, and I just kept running. I know as an outfielder, you've got to get that ball and get it to the cut quickly. I kept running hard. I looked to see the throw then I looked at Rodney, and he was still waving me, so I just put my head down and ran and scored."

Earlier in the game, Rafael Devers, who has been battling back woes for the last week and has been in and out of the lineup, pushed the envelope too much when a Shane McClanahan pitch to J.D. Martinez bounced out of catcher Francisco Mejía's mitt but not far enough. Devers had just doubled and took off for third, but he was easily thrown out.

"That one, that's the thing when we talk, you've got to slow it down and he saw it pop and he took off," said Cora. "We're upset because he made the out, but I'm more upset that he tried to go over there knowing we don't want him to do that [on his balky back]. But that's who he is and he's going to play hard and keep going. The effort was there, obviously the decision was OK, but yeah, Mejía threw the ball, it was a good throw."

Injuries, Cora said, are no excuse. This is particularly true the last three days because the Rays might be even more beat up than Boston.

"There's a lot of moving parts but they've got a lot of moving parts, they have a lot of injuries and they keep playing," said Cora. "They play 27 outs and they're playing good baseball and they're pitching and they're hustling and that's why they keep winning."

Coming into the Trop, the Sox had won two emotional games at Fenway against the Yankees to pull out a split of a four-game series. But that momentum has swiftly been erased by losses to the Rays in the first three games of this four-game series. The Red Sox are now 0-9-1 in series play against American League East foes and have a record of 11-23 in the division.

Boston will try to salvage something out of this trip to St. Petersburg in Thursday's finale. It gets even harder after that, with a three-game set at Yankee Stadium looming heading into the All-Star break.

"We had a great weekend, I'm not going to blast them," said Cora. "But you have to keep playing. Like I said, nobody is going to feel sorry for your injuries or whatever. You have to show up every day and we've been very sloppy lately and we've got to get better."