NEW YORK — The 2024 Red Sox were a fun and exciting team at times. They were often a resilient team (28 come-from-behind wins). They were a young team that stayed in the playoff race despite a flawed roster.
Now they are a dead team.
“We’re a .500 team,” manager Alex Cora said. “We’re playing .500 baseball. I don’t think that’s good enough. We’ve gotta be better. We’re playing .500 right now.”
It feels like this is it for the 2024 Red Sox who have a .500 record (70-70) for the first time since June 14 (35-35). This brutal 1-5 road trip — after a brutal 2-6 homestand — makes the 5 ½ game deficit in the AL Wild Card standings with 22 games remaining feel insurmountable.
“It sucked, man,” Cora said about the trip, which wrapped up Wednesday with an 8-3 loss to the Mets here at Citi Field. “It was tough. I think we went to Detroit 2 ½ games back or 3 ½ games back and now we’re 5 ½ (games back). We’re playing .500. Like I said, right now we’re just an average team. So you’ve gotta show up on Friday and try to be better. It’s a huge homestand, this one coming up.”
Boston hosts the 109-loss White Sox for three games at Fenway Park beginning Friday. Could a sweep get them back in it?
It’s difficult to view this coming homestand (three games vs. Chicago, three games vs. Baltimore) as a huge one taking into account the lack of games remaining and the way the Red Sox have played since the All-Star Break.
Boston is 17-27 with a negative-46 run differential in the second half. It’s difficult to believe this team — which walked in three runs in the eighth Wednesday after entering the inning down just one run — has enough to make up that much ground in that short of time. The Red Sox aren’t doing anything well right now. They have scored just eight runs in their past 45 innings. They have the second worst ERA (5.39) among major league teams in the second half. They have committed 102 errors, the most of any team in the big leagues this season.
But Cora — who emphasized that his team was “running out of time” after the first game of this series in New York — doesn’t think the deficit in the standings is too much to overcome.
“It’s not too much,” Cora said. “But we’re playing .500 baseball.”
Cora referred to the Red Sox as a .500 team seven different times in his postgame session.
“We’re playing .500 baseball,” Cora said. “Talking about the Royals and the Twins and everybody else, it doesn’t matter. We’re playing .500 baseball.”
Closer Kenley Jansen, who walked in one run and gave up four runs in the eighth, also said he thinks there’s time.
“We’ve just gotta fight,” Jansen said. “It’s not over until it’s over. So I think Minnesota lost. So we’ve just gotta fight, man. We’ve got three games against the White Sox. We’ve just gotta start from there.”
The Red Sox are now actually tied with the Tigers in the Wild Card standings.
“It’s hard. Definitely hard. It’s not how we want to play,” Jansen said.
The players gave fans a pretty fun season after ownership and the front office did very little in the offseason to improve the roster. But pretty fun seasons without playoff berths shouldn’t be acceptable in Boston. And for a third straight year, the Red Sox aren’t going to make the postseason. This should be a lesson for ownership when free agency begins.
