At this point, it’s difficult to consider the scene anything other than a preview of things to come Oct. 1, when the Sox pack up their things following the regular season finale and head home for the winter.
The Sox continued hurtling towards their first meaningless September since 2001 and their first October free of playoff baseball since 2003 Monday, when the Yankees completed a ruthlessly and almost cruelly effective five-game sweep with a 2-1 win in front of another sellout crowd of 35,829.
“We just ran into a buzz saw here against the Yankees,” Doug Mirabelli said. “They just, for three games, dominated us. And we helped, obviously, dominate ourselves in those first three games. But the last two games, I think we played pretty good baseball. Came up on the short end of the stick.”
The Sox, who were outscored 49-26 in suffering their first five-game sweep since 1954, fell 6 ½ back of the Yankees in the AL East and have lost a mind-boggling 10 games to the Yankees in the standings since July 21. Once again, the only good news for the Red Sox Monday took place in the central time zone, where the White Sox lost to the Tigers and remained four games ahead of the Red Sox in the wild card race.
“We came into this series thinking we could make up some ground,” Terry Francona said. “Everything went about as wrong as it could.
“It’s not been a very good five days. That’s probably the understatement of the year.”
The five-game losing streak is the longest for the Sox since May 1-4, 2004, when they lost five straight to the Rangers and Indians. The last time the Sox lost more than five straight was in 2001, when, at the nadir of the Joe Kerrigan era, they lost nine in a row from Aug. 25-Sept. 4.
And the five straight losses at Fenway marks the first time the Sox have lost five consecutive home games since Apr. 11-15, 1996, when they were in the midst of the worst 25-game start in franchise history.
“I think if we did go through a tougher stretch than this, I’d remember,” said Mirabelli, who has been with the Sox for most of the past five seasons. “This is a pretty tough stretch, especially at home. We usually take care of business pretty well at home.
“Obviously, this team is definitely better than what we showed this weekend. But that’s not necessarily good enough, to know that you’re better than what you played.”
The Yankees beat the Sox in every fashion imaginable. They left the Sox lamenting the tattered state of their pitching staff Friday and Saturday, when the Yankees won the first three games by a combined score of 39-20, out-hit the Sox 44-32 and drew 28 walks.
Curt Schilling came up with a stopper-type performance Sunday, but the Yankees scored the tying run off Jonathan Papelbon in the ninth and won in 10 innings. And Monday, the Sox got more than they could have hoped for out of 43-year-old David Wells, who allowed six hits in a season-high 7 1/3 innings.
But the Yankees, who basically fielded their “B” squad—Johnny Damon, Jason Giambi and Jorge Posada were all out of the starting lineup, Derek Jeter started at designated hitter and Mariano Rivera wasn’t used after throwing two innings Sunday—broke a scoreless tie on Bobby Abreu’s RBI double in the sixth inning and built an insurance run in the eighth via Nick Green’s double, a sacrifice and Keith Foulke’s wild pitch in the eighth.
The short-handed Sox—Kevin Youkilis sat out while Manny Ramirez left after the fourth inning due to a sore right hamstring—managed to strand 10 runners despite getting just one runner as far as third base prior to Wily Mo Pena’s solo homer in the eighth. The Sox left multiple runners on base in four of Cory Lidle’s six innings. Kyle Farnsworth, who hadn’t entered the ninth inning in a save situation since he blew a one-run lead in a loss to the Tigers June 1, retired the Sox in order on just nine pitches in the ninth.
Mirabelli said it was particularly difficult to end the series with a pair of well-pitched losses. “When you drop five games like that—you’re going to [have stretches] where you lose some tough games,” Mirabelli said. “That’s going to happen throughout a season. But when they’re ramped up at the end of three not so good games, then it makes it tough to swallow.”
With a super-sized deficit in the AL East and an imposing road trip against the Angels, Mariners and Athletics beginning tonight, the Sox’ mission now is deceptively simple: Try not to get overwhelmed by the enormity of the task ahead of them.
The 2004 Sox nearly erased a seemingly insurmountable deficit in the AL East—they gained seven games on the Yankees from Aug. 15-31—before their historic comeback in the ALCS. But with only eight members of that team currently on the 25-man roster, the Sox’ feats in 2004 are of little relevance today.
“I think the good thing in ’04 that we didn’t do was look too far ahead,” Mirabelli said. “The deck’s stacked against you like we had it in ’04, it would be easy to say the season was over. But when you break it down into that old cliché of one game at a time—at that point, it was definitely one game at a time because every game that we played at that point was the last game of our season. So it’s something [where] you fight back and you get down to just the basics of things and start playing good fundamental baseball.”
“Obviously, we’re in a hole,” Mike Lowell said. “You can’t look to gain six games in a week, because you’re looking at something that’s impossible.”
The Yankees might disagree.
Diehard managing editor Jerry Beach can be reached at diehardmag@yahoo.com. To receive a free issue of Diehard, call 888-979-0979.
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