Nathan Eovaldi struggles, Red Sox pitching woes continue in series loss to Royals

The Red Sox pitching staff looks like it’s running on empty.

Nathan Eovaldi didn’t have much working on Sunday, and when manager Alex Cora turned to the bottom part of his bullpen for help, it only made things worse.

The Red Sox took a 7-3 loss to the Royals, losing two out of three in Kansas City as they go into Monday’s off-day ahead of a critical three-game series with the Tampa Bay Rays on Tuesday.

“I thought Nate was good, I thought our defense was horrible,” manager Alex Cora said. “There were three plays today that we didn’t make, and it put us in a bad spot.”

Three takeaways:

1. Sunday’s game was a chance to get a little momentum before the Sox’ most critical six-game stretch of the season thus far. They’ll be in Tampa for three and then fly home to Boston for three more against the Yankees. 

But the pitching staff continues to look worse and worse as the season goes on.

After Eovaldi allowed four runs (three earned) in just four innings, the Red Sox ERA is now 4.29, 19th in MLB. One month earlier, on May 20, they had a 3.92 ERA, 13th in MLB. And a month before that, on April 20, the Sox had a 3.60 ERA, good for ninth overall.

The drastic downfall has been a team-wide effort, with the papier-mâché starting rotation starting to unravel and the bullpen proving to lack depth, albeit with an elite closer in Matt Barnes.

Sunday, the Sox got out to an early 2-0 lead when Kiké Hernandez got a hanging slider and hit it more than 400 feet for a two-run shot, his sixth homer of the year. It was with two strikes and two outs, continuing the Sox’ dominance with two strikes as they’ve been the best team in baseball this year in such situations.

But Eovaldi couldn’t get it going in this one. He started the game with a six-pitch first inning, but needed 66 pitches to get through the next two frames.

The Royals scored one in the bottom of the second, when Alberto Mondesi smoked a dead-red splitter for a double, then later came around to score on Bobby Dalbec’s sixth error of the season at first base.

2. All year Eovaldi has struggled with one bad inning in most of his starts, and it came in the third inning this time. 

After a leadoff single by Whit Merrifield, Eovaldi induced a weak groundball right back at him for a routine double play. But the veteran right-hander couldn’t handle it. The pitch went off his glove and he had to settle for one out at first.

In total, eight batters stepped up in the inning as the Royals had a pair of singles, a pair of doubles and a walk to score three and put the Sox in a 4-2 hole.

“I have to be able to make that play,” he said. “Any time on a hot day that you’re going to leave your defense out there, it’s not a good combination. It’s the same with the offense. Any time on those hot days, you have to do a better job getting back in the dugout so they can put together quality at-bats. I feel like we were on the reverse side of things. They were able to put long at-bats at the plate and grind out more pitches, which was leaving our defense out there. It’s a tough combination.”

He got sucked into long at-bats and couldn’t get strike three. The Royals fouled off a remarkable 20 pitches in Eovaldi’s four-plus innings of work.

“Yeah, they came out swinging the bat, that’s what it comes down to,” said Eovaldi, who now has a 3.90 ERA on the year. “They were taking good pitches. I was trying to get that first-pitch strike and expand a little bit. They weren’t swinging at anything when I expanded. Other times I wasn’t locating as well and they fouled off good pitches. I have to do a better job of attacking the strike zone and reading their swings a little better.”

Behind Eovaldi, relievers Darwinzon Hernandez and newly-acquired Yacksel Rios gave up three more runs to extend the Royals’ lead.

3. The Red Sox had a chance at a rally in the eighth inning.

Lefty Mike Minor — the same pitcher whose Texas Rangers team purposely dropped a fly ball against the Sox so he could have a chance at 200 strikeouts at the end of the 2019 season — held the Sox to just two runs in 6 2/3 innings.

But they put together a nice rally against the Royals’ bullpen. Rafael Devers hit a leadoff homer in the eighth, his 18th of the season, and the Sox then loaded the bases with one out for Marwin Gonzalez, who was in the game replacing the injured Christian Arroyo. Gonzalez then swung at a fastball under the zone and grounded into an inning-ending double play, lowering his season average to .195.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3gKz4BW