I mean…come on. Come ON. How is that possible? This team, man. This team. What can you say about a team that refuses to come through? The worst part is that I can’t decide what the truth is about these guys. Is it that the Sox have been unlucky? That they’ve come up a run short in what seems like a dozen games (I’m not going to look up stats for this because I’m writing this from a car, but I actually think that’s probably about right. I could probably look it up on my phone. Whatever). Or is the truth that they’re lucky to even have the record that they have, considering their very poor run differential (minus 51, tied for the worst in the American League).

More and more, I’m inclined to believe it’s the latter. The situations in which the Sox have, time and again, come up short aren’t happening in a vacuum. There’s a reason for repeated failure. It’s not a coincidence. The proof’s in the pudding. And Sox fans got a big helping of pudding last night. Even Don was despondent. He said we might’ve hit bottom. This team will find a way to lose.

[No videos for this one folks. Again, I’m in the car.]

The offense was unimpeachable in this one, as is usually the case with this team. I don’t mean that the offense is usually good, just that one side of the ball usually performs at least halfway decently while the other side decides to take the day off. You can’t blame Joe Kelly for this one – no, he didn’t have his absolute best stuff, but he did enough to expect to get the win, especially having been given eight runs of support .

No, most of the blame lies with Matt Barnes and Junichi Tazawa (much as that pains me to say). I’m gonna go ahead and say that giving up 8 runs without recording an out is an indication of bad pitching. Could it have simply been a case of these guys taking it easy, feeling comfortable with a multi-run lead? Probably. But it’s still embarrassing, and symptomatic of this team’s horrific pattern of losing.

You know what, there’s not much else to say about that side of the ball. The relief pitching was beyond terrible. On the bright side, Tazawa’s ERA remains significantly below 3.00, so this was, hopefully, an aberration on what has otherwise been an excellent year for him.

Let’s move onto the hitting, and compliment some guys that had great days:

• Blake Swihart, who did a great job of setting the table for the top of the order, going 2-4 with a walk and scoring 3 runs.
• Rusney Castillo, who went 3-4 with a double and a walk, scored a run and batted a runner in.
• Xander Bogaerts – 2-4 with a double, and scored a run. Batting from the 3-hole! Finally.
• David Ortiz – 2-4 with a walk and 2 RBI.
• Dustin Pedroia, Pablo Sandoval, and Mookie Betts – each of whom only had one hit on the day. But each one was a home run. Pretty, pretty, pretty good.

And let’s shame one man publicly (okay, this blog probably doesn’t count as public. Whatever) who just seems like he’s not going to turn it around:

• Mike Napoli – 0-5 with three strikeouts, including a huge strikeout (looking on an 0-2 count) with 2 outs and the bases loaded with the Sox down by 4 in the 8^th Pretty tough.

I’m done with this thing today. Ugh. I hope Mookie’s okay.