BOSTON -- For the Red Sox, this isn’t hat-tipping season. Not when they are trying to stay close enough in the American League Wild Card race to have a fighting chance in September.

However, an exception could be made on Saturday -- a day that Diamondbacks ace Zac Gallen was so nasty that hat-tipping was about the only thing the Red Sox could do when they discussed a 4-1 loss, which left them in need of a win on Sunday to avoid being swept in this three-game series.

Triston Casas, who struck out in all four of his at-bats (three of them against Gallen), provided a vivid description of what it was like to try to hit against one of the best pitchers in MLB.

“I think my day was pretty self-explanatory,” said Casas after the second Golden Sombrero of his career. “He was attacking the zone with multiple different pitches … and that curveball was on. The metrics were up.”

Casas didn’t need Baseball Savant to know how good those metrics were. He could see them with his own two eyes in that batter's box.

“And especially with two strikes, he was throwing a curveball that was starting as a ball, coming through the zone as a strike, and then ending as a ball,” said Casas. “It's tough to make a decision on which ones to swing at, especially with two strikes, especially when he's getting ahead with strike one, especially when he's got runners on base.

“So credit to him starting us off and then finishing with that. He was mixing up his approach as well. So he was starting slow and then starting fast. So he knows how to navigate a sixth inning, three times through the lineup; that’s why he's one of the best in the game. He was a handful today, for sure.”

Over six scoreless innings and 99 pitches, Gallen held the Red Sox to just two hits while walking four and striking out nine. If the walk total seemed a little high for such a sterling performance, part of that seemed to be by design, especially the two to Rafael Devers, the always-dangerous slugger.

“His willingness to put guys on base makes him that much tougher to hit, because he's not attacking the zone,” said Casas. “He’s just throwing stuff that's so close to the zone that you have to respect it and give it a swing at least.

“And you know, when he has late, late moving stuff, he's gonna get swing and miss, and then he's gonna tunnel those pitches off another so he can throw the fastball in the outer third, and then build the changeup off that, and then the curveball off that back door. He was really just dominating every part of the zone today.”

Crawford: ‘Kind of mediocre’
For the Red Sox to have any chance to beat Gallen on Saturday, they would have needed a top-of-the-line performance from their own starter.

While Crawford kept his team in the game, giving up three hits and two runs over five innings while walking two and striking out three, it wasn’t quite enough.

“Kind of mediocre,” Crawford said. “Didn't get ahead as much as I wanted to, didn't throw enough strikes, got a little trouble there in the fourth and fifth and [Eugenio] Suárez put a good swing on a ball. But yeah, overall, pretty mediocre.”

After a three-start slump following the All-Star break in which he gave up 12 home runs, Crawford has been better his last three outings, pitching to a 5.17 ERA but holding opponents to a .148 average and a .511 OPS. The biggest goal for Crawford is to pitch deeper into games like he was earlier in the season. Saturday marked the seventh straight start he fell shy of six innings.

Cora laments sloppy seventh
Despite Gallen’s brilliance, the Red Sox could have been just two runs down when the D-backs went to the bullpen in the seventh, if only Boston’s ‘pen had a clean top of the seventh.

Instead, things got sloppy. Lucas Sims walked two of the three batters he faced. The normally trusty Brennan Bernardino came on and also walked two, forcing a run in. A wild pitch by Bernardino allowed a fourth run to score.

“I mean, at this level, we cannot do that,” said Red Sox manager Alex Cora. “We had the right matchups. It just didn't work out.”