The 7-run inning so weird, you can’t help but marvel how the Red Sox got here

Whatever quality the unbeaten Rays have, the Red Sox at the moment appear to have the exact opposite.

Randy Arozarena was hardly in a great position to hit as he singled in a run during Tampa's seven-run fifth on Thursday. Steve Nesius/Associated Press

By Jon Couture

April 14, 2023

5 minutes to read

COMMENTARY

Advance warning: I only want to talk about that fifth inning today. In fact, I can not imagine talking about anything but that fifth inning.

“It’s frustrating,” Christian Arroyo told reporters after Thursday’s 9-3 loss to the 13-0 Rays was done. “We want to come in here and take at least two of them and have a successful road trip. But that’s how it went.

“Seven-run fifth.”

Seven-run fifth. If an average seven-run fifth exists, this was most decidedly not that.

There were worse innings just on Thursday around Major League Baseball. The Twins beat the Yankees slightly more often than the Red Sox win at Tropicana Field — Boston’s lost 13 straight and 20 of 23 at the St. Pete Pinball Machine after these last four running. Despite that, Minnesota hung nine in the first inning at Yankee Stadium, with three straight homers and another three rockets.

And as seven-run innings go, we’re still in the statute of limitations to talk about the Double-A Rocket City Trash Pandas giving up that many to lose a no-hitter via six walks and three hit batters.

“We have a saying that you’ve heard many times: Stuff happens. And it happened,” Rocket City coach Dann Bilardello told The Athletic. “You’ve just gotta move on.”

The Red Sox will. They have a pretty big weekend ahead, facing Shohei Ohtani and the Angels while we commemorate all that 2013 entailed. (You’ll have to pay extra to watch Friday’s game via Apple TV+, which is a heck of an ask after Thursday’s.)

Stuff most certainly happened to them in the fifth inning Thursday. But it wasn’t six missiles, and it wasn’t a parade of pitching gaffes. Nor was it simply what it appears from 1,000 miles up: The best team in baseball, facing a breathtakingly thin lineup, and simply overwhelming it.

For one thing, that lineup was leading the Rays, who hadn’t trailed at the end of an inning at home until the Red Sox took a 2-1 lead in the fourth they built to 3-1 in their half of the fifth for Corey Kluber.

Any nine can beat any other on any one day. It’s the nature of the sport. These Red Sox lost, 1-0, on Monday, hung around most of Wednesday . . . a sweep is a sweep, but there was something here that is somehow both notable and meaningless in the face of, well, of a seven-run fifth.

Even with the understanding our existence is based on an incomprehensible parade of flaps of butterfly wings, the parade of events in the next 11 batters is quite a mix. Harold Ramírez, who hit doubles off both Kluber and Richard Bleier, began down two strikes and just about chased a curveball away in the dirt before he tucked an up-and-in Kluber miss inside the left-field line.

Kluber threw a fastball off the knob of Francisco Mejía’s bat to get him 0-2, then gave up an RBI single on a pitch Mejia hit one-handed because it was shin-high and well outside. A dreadful break, but again Kluber had missed his spot, which continued even as he got Yandy Díaz to fly out.

It made the decision to pull him for Bleier and a lefty-lefty matchup easy to understand, despite seven strikeouts, despite having struck out the next batter (Brandon Lowe) all five times he’d faced him in his career, and despite being one out from qualifying for a win. Kluber was lucky to get that close to out of it.

Bleier was not lucky. We can debate whether he was particularly good, or whether Alex Cora should’ve gotten a righty warming faster. The fact remains a pitcher whose stock-in-trade is getting ground balls got four of them in pursuit of one out. Their expected batting averages, based on launch angle and exit velocity: .110, .380, .240, .230.

All four scored runs.

When Bleier caught too much of the inner half with a first-pitch sinker, Brandon Lowe four-hopped it past a diving Arroyo to make it 3-3. Thus ended the lefty-lefty dream, but it’s not as though any of the ensuing bats overwhelmed him. When he got Randy Arozarena to two strikes, he gave him the same type of pitch Mejía got — shin-high and away. A pitch pitchers want chased.

Arozarena one-hand pushed it into right, Arroyo pulled closer to second for a possible force. Three runs, 4-3.

Bleier got a strike on Wander Franco, then hit him. Tampa pinch-hit former Sox farmhand Manuel Margot, another righty who was 0-for-7 in the series before Thursday.

Bunt single without a throw, to which NESN’s Kevin Youkilis had muttered “no way” before Bleier had even fielded it. Four runs, 5-3.

“I mean, did you think he was going to bunt?,” Cora told reporters when asked if his team had anticipated it. “That’s where they are, confidence-wise.”

It brought up Ramírez again, this time with the bases loaded. Again, he got a pitch off the plate. Again, he chased it. Again, it was a double just inside the line, this one two-hopped under a diving Bobby Dalbec — at third base with Rafael Devers given the day off.

Seven runs, 8-3.

“Holy mackerel,” NESN’s Dave O’Brien declared.

“It escalated quickly,” Will Flemming said on Red Sox radio, his pregame declaration of the continuing “Nightmare on 16th Street” fulfilled.

“We’ve come up with some timely hitting. That might have been the most timely to date,” Rays manager Kevin Cash told reporters. “But we got momentum, and it seemed like it was just going to continue to roll.”

What’s there to say? The season’s two weeks old and Cora had a 3-4-5 of Rob Refsnyder (who homered), Triston Casas (who’s 5 for 38), and Dalbec (who probably shouldn’t be here). Yet, as the Globe’s Peter Abraham smartly noted, would Devers, Adam Duvall, and Masataka Yoshida (who missed the last two games with a tight hamstring) really have made a difference?

Tampa easily leads the majors with 32 homers in 13 games, then scored seven without even sniffing one in that inning. They aren’t going to do that all season because no one does. All the talk of the 1987 Brewers, who (along with the 1982 Braves) also started 13-0, fails to note the other interesting thing about them.

Two weeks later, they lost 12 in a row. After a 6-18 May, they were never better than third the rest of the year.

That’s irrelevant to our story, of course, not least because these Rays have a higher ceiling. (Sports Illustrated tabbed the ’87 Brewers for last place.) We have years and years of evidence that there is something magic in MLB’s most terrible ballpark. (Trust me: If the Red Sox played there, you wouldn’t go either.)

Whatever the Rays do, they make it work. Then and now.

At the moment, the exact opposite feels true for these Red Sox. Above and beyond their flawed roster, their lack of luck outside of one dropped fly ball against Baltimore, their whatever the opposite of positive momentum is.

“We have to turn the page,” Cora told reporters, the beard looking particularly gray for April 13. “That’s the most important thing.”