It was a tale of two halves for Henry Owens last night. If baseball games had halves. Which they don’t. But still!

Owens’ first four innings were perfect. Seriously, look:

PITCHERS	IP	H	R	ER	BB	SO	HR	ERA
Owens	4.0	0	0	0	0	4	0	3.97

But if there’s one thing I know about Henry Owens, it’s that he has a tendency to get rattled when things aren’t perfect.

Logan Forsythe smashed the first pitch of the fifth inning into the left-center gap to break up Owens’ perfect stretch, and the Rays did what they had to in order to get the run across: a sacrifice bunt and a sacrifice fly did the trick. Suddenly, the 2-run Boston lead (provided by Travis Shaw on a 1st inning bases-loaded single) was down to 1.

Things got worse for Owens in the 6th. He walked Richie Shaffer on five pitches, and on the next three consecutive pitches, he got Luke Maile to pop out, hit Guyer on a wild inside pitch, and gave up a single to Mikie Mahtook. Bases loaded, one out.

The next batter, Evan Longoria, lifted a fly ball to right field, and Mookie Betts should probably have just eaten the ball. Instead, he absolutely airmailed a throw to home plate. Owens, backing up the throw, not only missed the ball (letting it get into the stands to score another runner) but looked pretty awkward in the process. A real lose-lose. 3-2, Tampa.

Owens had another tough inning in the 7th, but got out of it without giving up any runs despite loading the bases with no outs. After Shaw botched an attempt to field a soft ground ball to first (it went down as an infield single) to load the bases following a single and a walk, he redeemed himself by firing home to get the inning’s first out on a soft ground ball from Shaffer. Three pitches later, Owens managed to get the ball home on another soft grounder to start a 1-2-3 double play to end the inning.

Owens was looking pretty shaky at this point – might it have been time to remove him from the game? Possibly, but Torey Lovullo disagreed. On the one hand, the Sox were only down one and Owens had either lost his best stuff or was rattled. On the other, Boston is essentially playing for the love of the game at this point, and this game represented a good opportunity to let Owens pitch deep. Plus, he’d only thrown 76 pitches through 7! I think if this team was in the midst of a serious playoff push, Lovullo might’ve deferred to the bullpen, but as it is, I can’t really blame him.

For the record, though, it went poorly. Double, home run, 5-2. Owens’ line after the 4th inning doesn’t look quite as pretty:

PITCHERS	IP	H	R	ER	BB	SO	HR	ERA
Owens	3.1	7	5	4	2	1	1	4.41

Now down 3 runs, the Boston offense did manage to put runners on base in both the 8th and 9th innings. But Xander Bogaerts tried and failed (by a split second) to stretch a Green Monster single into a double in the 8th, and Shaw’s leadoff walk in the 9th amounted to approximately nothing. 5-2, final.

Notes:

Bogaerts went 2-3, walked, and scored a run, but his failed 8th inning stretch was the second of two baserunning mistakes. In the 3rd, when the Sox still had a 2-0 lead, Bogaerts led off with a double. But he completely misread a David Ortiz broken bat bloop, pretty much running on contact. Maybe he didn’t know a ball could fly that far off a broken bat. Whatever the reason, he was doubled off easily.