A play here, a play there and things could have turned out much differently for the Boston Red Sox on their six-game West Coast road trip.
It ended with a thud Wednesday with the Red Sox dropping the series finale, 6-3, to the Seattle Mariners at T-Mobile Park.
Boston finished the trip 2-4, but the record doesn’t tell the full story. The Red Sox suffered a pair of walk-off defeats to the San Francisco Giants and saw the Mariners break open a tied game in the seventh inning on Monday before Boston let a lead slip away — thanks to some defensive miscues — at that same juncture Wednesday.
While Red Sox manager Alex Cora factored in the nature of those games, it didn’t take out the sting of coming up empty when he assessed how his team performed on the road trip.
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“Tough one,” Cora told reporters, as seen on NESN postgame coverage. “We’re going home and we got a good stretch coming up. Two walk-off losses, two tough games here. We didn’t play horrible baseball. It just didn’t happen. We’ll be ready for Friday.”
The Red Sox will have an off day Thursday to regroup before opening up a season-long 10-game homestand starting Friday. They begin that stretch with a critical three-game series against the Toronto Blue Jays, who own a 2 1/2-game lead for the third and final American League wild card spot over Boston.
The Red Sox have owned their divisional counterpart this season, though, beating the Blue Jays all seven times they have faced. Keeping to that trend could catapult the Red Sox, especially with two dregs of the league in the Kansas City Royals and Detroit Tigers on deck after that.
“Just got to be ready,” Cora said. “It’s going to be fun this weekend against the Jays and then after that we have to play good baseball.”
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