BALTIMORE -- Prior to the opener of a six-game road trip, Red Sox manager Alex Cora was in crisis management mode regarding his mightily slumping team.
“You have to cancel the noise, because it's loud -- very loud,” said Cora. “Anywhere you look, they're talking about us, how bad we are. Deservedly so. The record is the record, but I don't think we have a bad team. We’re just going through a bad stretch.”
The bad stretch continued Friday night with a different kind of noise than the kind Cora was speaking of.
This noise was Brayan Bello (1-3, 9.00 ERA) giving up one rocket after another in what was easily the worst of his 102 career starts.
The Red Sox (9-17) paid the price, suffering a 10-3 defeat to the Orioles for their fourth straight loss. It wasn’t the way they wished to start their trip. This is the worst start for a Boston team through 26 games since the ‘20 squad went 8-18.
Bello was pummeled for career highs in hits (13) and homers (five) while tying a career high in earned runs (eight). All while throwing a whopping 85 pitches in 3 1/3 innings.
“Just keep attacking the strike zone,” said Bello. “I know that my pitches are good. I know that I'm a good pitcher. It’s just a bad day.”
A month into the season, bad days have been stacking up for the Red Sox, who are tied with the Royals for the worst record in the American League.
As one of the few veteran position players in a young starting lineup, shortstop Trevor Story is trying to keep things in perspective.
“The wins are in the margins and in the details,” Story said. “We’ve shown flashes of it but just not consistent enough at all.”
As for Bello, it wasn’t as if this one could just be chalked up as a bad night. This was the fourth time in Bello’s five starts he has pitched fewer than five innings, and the third time he’s given up four earned runs or more.
“You look at it, and the stuff looks good velocity-wise, and the action of the pitches,” said Cora. “We'll sit down tomorrow and break it down. I think to sit down today and go over it doesn't make any sense.”
As the outing wore on, Bello failed to gain any momentum, not putting up a single goose egg in four tries. Cora made a rare visit to the mound in which he didn’t lift his pitcher. With one out in the third inning, he challenged Bello to gather himself.
“The reason I went to the mound is we don't need [him] to put his head down,” said Cora. “We’re here to compete. We’ve got to go out here with our best, and regardless of the situation, you’ve got to keep competing. And he actually did. We’ve got to figure it out.”
Bello appreciated the pep talk.
“Yeah, [it helped] a lot,” said Bello. “I think that when I got the walk [before the mound visit], I lost my confidence a little bit, but he came right out and gave me that confidence and just motivated me to keep going.”
Though Bello got through that inning without further damage, the O’s struck for more in the fourth when Rutschman mauled his second two-run homer of the night.
When the next two hitters reached, Cora had no choice but to remove his starter.
Caught up in the moment after the nadir of his young career, Bello spiked the resin bag. When he got back to the dugout, he toppled over a plastic container of gum with his glove.
“They want to perform. They want to be good, right? And he was having a horrible day,” said Cora. “He's not upset at game-planning or game-calling. He's upset at himself because he expects more, and we expect more from him. I expect more from the team too, and from myself.”
Unlike in the final three days of the homestand against the Yankees, the Red Sox generated at least some offense, scoring three runs (which matched their total in the New York series) on 10 hits.
But a rally in the ninth was short-circuited when Marcelo Mayer strayed too far off second base and got thrown out when Story didn’t tag and try to score.
“The way it ended, we’ve got to be better than that, and that's something that we've been talking about,” Cora said. “Play the right way, regardless of the situation. We’ve got to be smart. We cannot make those mistakes. They know it. We’ve got a bunch of kids that are learning the game. It's my job to keep teaching them the game.”
Of late, the growing pains have been harsher than usual.