Through five long innings on Friday night, Nick Pivetta set and extinguished several little fires. He was burned once, though, on a three-run shot in the third inning from which the Red Sox never recovered in a 5-3 loss at Kauffman Stadium.

Pivetta allowed traffic in each frame, including the first two batters in the first inning, but he only paid for it once. With two on and two out in the third, he tried to wedge a high fastball into the inner-third of the zone, and Adalberto Mondesi was there with his barrel to greet it.

“He put a good swing on a 96-mile-an-hour fastball up and in,” Pivetta said. “I mean, those are gonna happen. [He] kinda sold out for it, but at the end of the day, just gotta keep moving forward.”

Boston’s right-hander was otherwise pretty good, mixing tons of sliders in with his mid-90s fastball and striking out five of his final nine hitters. But the lone homer -- his sixth allowed in the past three starts -- proved costly. The Royals added two more runs on extra-base hits (an RBI double and a solo home run) to create adequate distance.

Pivetta would probably like to put some distance between himself and the month of June, as he’s now 0-3 with a 5.66 ERA in four starts since the calendar flipped. He was 6-0 with a 3.86 ERA before that, but the long ball has continued to bite.

“I think it’s just limiting those (mistake) pitches and making sure that they’re more crisp, in a sense,” he said.

On Pivetta's mistake, the Royals generated as much damage as the Red Sox did all night. In the early stages, Boston deployed a death-by-a-thousand-paper-cuts technique, spraying eight singles through five innings. But they scored only once in that span, while stranding seven baserunners.

“It’s just more about what we did offensively and what we didn’t do,” Red Sox manager Alex Cora said. “There were some good at-bats that we felt were game-changers, and we didn’t finish it. It just happens.”

Among the game-changers was a bases-loaded chance in the fifth, when Rafael Devers struck out swinging on a slider that was buried so well it hit his foot. Even more confounding was the double play Boston suffered in the third that blew up a big chance.

The Red Sox opened that inning with three consecutive singles, plating one run and leaving a pair on the corners. Then, when J.D. Martinez hit a one-hopper to third, Christian Arroyo froze up on his way home. The Royals went to second base for the forceout, then fired to the plate to nab Arroyo for an unconventional 5-4-2 twin-killing.

Afterward, Arroyo described it as an “awkward play” in which he wanted to “sneak a run.” Cora wanted more decisiveness from his runner: If you’re going, commit on contact; if not, stay put at third.

“It was a big, big play at the moment,” Cora said. “I think the thought process was to go, but he hesitated.”

The significance of that play was difficult to know at the time, because the Red Sox -- who scored 10 runs apiece in their previous two games -- aren’t held down on offense very often.

Thanks to Devers’ solo shot in the eighth (which extended his RBI streak to five games) the Red Sox were only a swing or two away when they brought the top of the order up in the final frame. They went quietly, though, to cap a hot night (97 degrees at first pitch) against an ice cold team (the Royals had lost 11 of 12).

“Just kind of a weird game,” Cora said. “We had a lot of traffic out there, and I don’t know. It just felt, like, off … It just didn’t feel right in a sense. We kept putting good at-bats, then we’d chase pitches. I don’t know. It just sucks that we lost that game.”