The Red Sox hung in most of the night against the defending World Series champions. But ultimately it was another loss to another club considered one of baseball’s best. Hernández’s blast turned a one-run deficit — doable against an injury-ravaged Los Angeles bullpen — into a three-run hole that proved insurmountable. And it drew audible cheers, Dodgers fans making up a significant portion of the sellout crowd of 36,369.
With two games to go in this post-All-Star-break “gauntlet,” as chief baseball officer Craig Breslow described it, against high-end National League clubs, the Red Sox are 2-5.
They have held a lead at the end of just 10 innings out of 66 played.
“When you’re playing against really good ball clubs like we have over the last week, execution is key,” Alex Bregman said. “Just got to do a better job all around. I’m confident in this group. And I think we will … I think the group has a good mentality. We believe in one another. We believe we’re a playoff team. We just got to go out there and execute a little bit better. It’s one pitch here, one pitch there, and we’re right where we want to be.”
Bregman wasn’t exaggerating with the one-pitch-here sentiment. He actually had an example.
In the first inning, Duran worked a 10-pitch walk against Dodgers righthander Emmet Sheehan. On the next pitch, the first to Bregman, Duran took off for second — “a great jump,” Bregman said.
But Bregman swung at a fastball on the outer edge of the plate, fouling it off. Duran, head down, slid into second. He confirmed with second base umpire Dan Merzel that yeah, shoot, he had to go back to first.
“I should’ve taken the first pitch,” Bregman lamented. “He would’ve got to second, I would’ve been able to move him over [to third] with a ground ball to second base [which is how Bregman’s at-bat ended]. We could’ve gotten off to a lead there in the first.”
Such a sequence may well have had the power to alter the course of the game. In reality, the Sox fell behind by three runs by the end of the third inning and never recovered.
The Red Sox are 55-50 overall and 7-19 against teams with a .550 winning percentage or better.
With two on and two out in the bottom of the ninth, Rob Refsnyder represented the would-be tying run. But he grounded out against Ben Casparius, a Westport, Conn., native and UConn alumnus who recorded his first career save.
“We keep grinding, we put together good at-bats. We’re right back in the game,” said manager Alex Cora. “Then Teoscar hit that ball out of the ballpark. Overall, yeah, they won the game, but it wasn’t bad, to be honest.”
The Sox managed to hold Shohei Ohtani, whom Cora before the game dubbed “the best athlete in the universe,” to an unremarkable 1-for-4 line with a single, two strikeouts, and a walk.
Red Sox righthander Brayan Bello (5⅓ innings, three runs) and Sheehan (five innings, two runs) took turns pitching OK.
Bello’s outing was the first time since May 28 that he failed to complete six innings in a start. He had gone eight in a row meeting that minimum. On the season, he owns a 3.32 ERA.
“It feels like the bad one is six innings, three runs,” Cora said before the game. “That’s the mark of a good pitcher.”
Also present throughout his strong run: Connor Wong. Friday marked Bello’s 10th consecutive start with the backup backstop as his batterymate.
“I just like it,” Cora said, noting that they work well together and cracking a smile to add: “One day Carlos [Narváez] was very emotional with Bello. I was like, we need to split up the Latino guys.”
For Sheehan, it was a homecoming of sorts. The Darien, Conn., native played at Boston College. The Dodgers (61-43) drafted him in the eighth round in 2021, and this was his first time pitching at Fenway Park as a major leaguer.
Bello grinded through a 40-pitch third inning but managed to limit the damage to two runs. A couple of soft singles — plus a hard one from Will Smith — loaded the bases with one out. Bello walked Hernández to force in a run. Andy Pages’s sacrifice fly brought in another.
“They fouled off a lot of pitches, they were taking good pitches as well,” Bello said. “They scored two runs there but I kept being competitive.”
The Sox battled back with two runs in the bottom of the third, but it could have been more.
Wong opened the rally with a double off the Green Monster — his first extra-base hit of the season. At 102 plate appearances, Wong was the slowest Sox hitter to his first extra-base hit since Mike Greenwell needed 103 trips to bat in 1992.
Duran singled in Wong, then scored on Bregman’s Monster-scraping double.
But Sheehan retired the next nine batters to finish his outing. The Red Sox went 2-for-23 after Bregman’s hit.
On some days recently, Cora has blamed strong opposing pitching for offensive struggles. Not so much this time.
“It was more on us tonight than them,” he said. “But you’re going to have nights like that.”
Tim Healey can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @timbhealey.
