Not confident the Red Sox can stay in a playoff spot? Sounds like they aren’t, either.

COMMENTARY

What happened Thursday for these Red Sox certainly beat what happened Wednesday in a rout. And yet, I’m afraid it also makes clear Wednesday is a little more close to their level than us optimists would like to admit.

A 12-2 thrashing of the Twins with Chris Sale on the mound was an all-too-rare laugher for a group that had the AL’s best record just one month ago. Their returning ace has ripped through three bad teams as expected, though Thursday he went from four no-hit innings to leaving with one out in the sixth, tying run at the plate.

No matter. Garrett Whitlock cleaned up, during which time the Sox scored five more runs to render worries moot. (At least until Matt Barnes pitched the ninth, but we’ll get there.)

“Obviously, there’s some things that we’ve still got to do better,” manager Alex Cora told reporters. “But we’ll take it and we move on.”

It sounded better than it reads, but it’s a reminder of just how bleary and defeated he sounded the night before. Boston’s won four of six, but the two losses were screamers — 10-1 to the abysmal Rangers, which Cora formally called “embarassing,” and Wednesday vs. Minnesota, a forget-the-outs, pitch-chasing, slow-out-of-the-box debacle that was nearly as bad.

“As a group, we’re not doing a good job with that. Those things you can control — know the outs, run out of the box,” Cora told reporters Wednesday. “It’s one of those that we need to, at this stage . . . it’s tough to watch. We talk about it, but it keeps happening.”

A day later, the pressure was off, and Cora’s team suddenly played like it again. Their three-plus months of pulling games from the fire almost nightly feels like another season, and the players seem as keenly aware of it as anyone.

A bit of a problem when the pressure likely won’t be this low again.

Owing to their start, the Red Sox remain playoff-bound this Friday morning: Three games behind the rampaging Yankees to host the wild-card game, and 2 1/2 ahead of Oakland. They’ve won seven of nine at Fenway, though against Baltimore, Texas, and Minnesota, a playoff team should expect no less.

That run is over now. Outside of .500 Cleveland, who the Sox face six times in 10 days, they’ve got East-leading Tampa, the Central-leading White Sox, and are at hanging-around Seattle between now and mid-September. It’s a run much closer to the in-division one the Sox mucked up out of the All-Star break.

They have steadied, but they’re still reeling, and they’re headed on the road looking mighty vulnerable. Not least of which because on Monday, in response to getting stomped by Texas, the Sox held a players-only meeting where they discussed … energy.

“We want to play energized. That’s it. It doesn’t matter if something good is happening, bad is happening,” Alex Verdugo explained to reporters, likening it to “what Little Leaguers do” and hitting on hearing encouragement from the dugout while at the plate.

Good gravy.

Little Leaguers also don’t always run out of the box, as Verdugo didn’t Wednesday on his way to being thrown out. They forget how many outs there are and miss tags, as Christian Vázquez has lately. They throw the ball around and generally muddle about in the field.

They’re a little too eager to celebrate. And they need to be reminded constantly about the little things.

Consider:

— According to Fangraphs, no team swings at a higher percentage of pitches outside the zone than the Red Sox. You have to go back nearly a decade, to Washington in 2012, to find the last time a better-than-.500 team led the league in that. It’s a trademark of bad baseball.

— As adeptly pointed out by Red Sox Stats, they are about to finish a third straight year of vastly underperforming on defense. Despite making it a spring focus and revisiting it early in the year, they are simply not converting ground balls into outs at anywhere near the rate a good team should.

Bobby Dalbec is the worst defensive first baseman in baseball, per Defensive Runs Saved, and his failures have shuffled the outfield (specifically Kiké Hernández) in ways that make the whole array worse. Especially when Xander Bogaerts (third-worst shortstop in DRS) and Rafael Devers (just outside the bottom 10 of third basemen) are well below average as well.

That, frankly, is a big part of Barnes’s problems.

But so, of course, is Barnes.

His rise to dominance in the first half was about a lot of things, but primary among them was confidence. He pounded the strike zone to the tune of more than 70 percent in the first few months of 2021, believing his stuff was good enough to beat anyone.

Now? That overpowering fastball is getting mislocated, and getting hit. His confidence is shot, and even pitching in a 10-run game Thursday, his fastball velocity was down and his command seemed spotty.

“I picked a bad time to start sucking,” he declared earlier in the week.

This much talk about confidence inevitably spins us back to a month ago, when the Red Sox apparently prioritized staying under the luxury tax to truly supplementing this roster for a deep run. Increasingly, though, that feels like a copout.

For one, what they did add has delivered. Kyle Schwarber’s not a perfect fit, but that .571 on-base for 10 games is bonkers good. A big part of the reason Wednesday’s game felt like such a squander was Austin Davis, quietly acquired July 30, tossed 2 2/3 perfect innings. He’s been excellent as well.

Moreover, is this not still the group who spent the whole spring, and most of the first half, telling us what a surprise they were going to be? How they were good? That’s basically been Cora’s answer to “Do Damage” in 2018, the chorus that followed every comeback, every victory.

All this time, it felt mostly like it was for us on the outside, a player’s manager keeping most of the real stuff in house. Increasingly, it’s clear it was mostly for the guys on the inside, and that maybe he’s as lost for how to help as the rest of us are.

If the Red Sox can’t sustain its position in these final 33 games, it won’t be near as ugly a flop as a supremely talented 2011 team going down in flames, but it’ll be a major letdown. Cora will earn his share of the blame, and wear it. The continued thrift of his bosses will warrant some serious explanation as well.

But ultimately, it will be because they weren’t good enough. Because they crumbled when the real adversity hit. Because they didn’t do the little things well. It will, frankly, validate their bosses’ decision not to overextend for them given the deep steel atop the American League.

It’s a hard statement, but the Red Sox have been hard to watch when it counts lately. For good teams, days like Thursday are rote.

If they feel like a welcome relief, it’s probably because you aren’t good enough.

Jon Couture

Jon Couture is a contributor at Boston.com, focused primarily on the Red Sox.

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