NEW YORK -- For weeks, the Red Sox have been trying to regain their spark offensively.
They now have one more chance to find it. Tuesday’s 9-0 defeat to the electric Cam Schlittler and the Yankees in Game 1 of this American League Wild Card Series has put manager Chad Tracy’s club on the brink of elimination.
Life moves fast in the best-of-three Wild Card round, as evidenced by the fact that teams taking a 1-0 lead have gone on to win the series 21 of 24 times (88%), including 17 two-game sweeps. Home teams have won all nine series in which they have gone ahead 1-0, including eight sweeps.
But the Red Sox have faced situations just as daunting, opening the season 32-46 before going on a 32-5 surge that propelled them into the postseason.
“I haven’t heard the fat lady singing yet,” said Red Sox lefty Payton Tolle, who took the loss. “We're just going to keep going out there. I believe in us. So, it's going to be fun to watch these guys compete [Wednesday].”
A few hours prior to Game 1, Tracy expressed some optimism that he finally had his “A” lineup together, something that hardly happened in September as key players (Ceddanne Rafaela, Willson Contreras and Adley Rutschman) missed time with injuries.
However, Schlittler, the front-runner to win the AL Cy Young Award, is tough for any lineup to produce against.
Particularly a team that didn’t have much offensive momentum going into the playoffs. In their 24 regular-season games in September, the Sox were last in the Majors in runs per game (3.0), batting average (.219) and OPS (.651).
“We've been kind of slow on the offensive side, but we're taking good at-bats,” said right fielder Wilyer Abreu. “Tomorrow is another day. We can come back and win the series. We still have two more games, so I'm very optimistic about our team, and tomorrow is going to be a really good day for us.”
Tuesday, however, was anything but.
It was as if Schlittler, the Walpole, Mass., native, picked up where he left off in closing the Red Sox out in Game 3 of last year’s Wild Card Series, when he threw eight shutout innings. This time, he fired 6 1/3 innings of scoreless baseball, allowing two hits and one walk while punching out 10.
To make matters worse, the Red Sox lost Roman Anthony after two at-bats when he felt soreness in the same right hand/wrist that kept him out for nearly four months. His status for Game 2 is iffy, at best.
For the Red Sox, it was simply too much Schlittler, who is now 4-1 with a 0.47 ERA in six career starts against Boston, including the postseason.
“Cam was obviously awfully good,” said Tracy. “The fastball shapes are well-documented. He's throwing hard. He also had a good curveball today that you know it's there, but he used it a little bit more often. He landed it if he wanted to for strikes. He was able to get it beneath for swing and miss. We weren't able to do much with him.”
Tolle, making his first career postseason start, kept Boston in the game despite lacking Schlittler’s dominance. The Yankees touched him up for the first run of the game on a two-out RBI single by Austin Wells in the bottom of the second.
Tolle came out with two outs and nobody on in the fifth, and Tracy called on lefty Erik Miller, who struggled in September, to face the dangerous Ben Rice. The move didn’t work. Rice scorched Miller’s third pitch, a misplaced 96.8 mph sinker, over the wall in center for a solo shot to make it 2-0.
A tight game through six innings unraveled when the Yankees scored two in the seventh and five in the eighth, including a grand slam by Rice, who, like Schlittler, grew up in a Boston suburb (Cohasset).
To stave off elimination on Wednesday, the Red Sox will put the ball in the hands of trusted veteran starter Sonny Gray and hope the offense can have a revival against tough Yankees lefty Max Fried.
“Just win each pitch,” said Red Sox third baseman Caleb Durbin. “It is going to be a dogfight. That’s just kind of the nature of this point of the year. Just come back, refocus, and be ready to play hard.”