Manager Alex Cora took responsibility for his team’s poor play after the Rays annihilated the Red Sox on Monday.
Boston’s lifeless offense managed just six hits and starting pitcher Tanner Houck gave up 12 runs and 10 hits while recording only seven outs.
It seems like there was a team that was prepared for the other one and the other one wasn’t prepared for them,” Cora said. “That goes from top all the way to the bottom. That wasn’t a good night for us. I’ll take the blame because it seemed like our team wasn’t ready to go.”
The Red Sox (8-10) have lost six of their past eight games. They lead the majors with 20 errors after Alex Bregman made his fourth error of the season in Tampa’s nine-run bottom of the third inning.
“The defense has been bad. The offense has been bad and we’ve been inconsistent pitching-wise,” Cora said. “So those are the three pillars of baseball and we haven’t been good.”
Cora said he needs to show up Tuesday and prepare his team better.
“Obviously that wasn’t a fun night from the get-go. From pitch one, it wasn’t fun,” Cora said. “We’ve just gotta regroup, come here tomorrow and have a clean game. It would be good to have a clean game.”
Bregman made Boston’s only error but there were a couple of Rays hits that could have been ruled errors.
Jarren Duran also allowed a runner to score all the way from first base on Brandon Lowe’s 100.2 mph, 242-foot single to left field in the second inning. He threw into second base as both Taylor Walls and Jake Mangum scored.
Today we didn’t turn a double play,” Cora said. “Alex booted a ball. Jarren, he threw to second and we redirected the ball to the plate. That was a good play by them. But I don’t think it’s decision-making. I think we’re just not catching the ball.”
Boston has scored 78 runs in 18 games, an average of 4.3 runs per game. But 31 of those runs (39.7%) came in two games against the Cardinals. Boston has scored 47 runs in its other 16 games, an average of 2.9 runs per game.
“We’re not playing good baseball,” Cora said. “That doesn’t mean that we’re not ready to win. … We have to play better. We know that. And I said it from day one, like for us to be where we want to be, we have to be consistent on the things that we do. And honestly we’ve been consistently bad the last 10 days.”
When Trevor Story was told that Cora took the blame, he said, “No. I mean, we’re the ones out there playing the game. There’s a certain pride when you wear this jersey. … We have to look ourselves in the mirror and we’ve gotta be honest with ourselves. But there’s a lot of baseball to be played. We know the type of team that we have. We can turn it around. I’m very confident in that.”
