Credit the Red Sox with this, at least: they made it easier on their fans this time. There were no 12 stranded runners, no close lead lost late. They tore the band-aid off quick, letting everyone know the 10-3 loss was coming from very early on.
In fact, before the game started, some of this was too easy to see coming. The Yankees had picked up their most recent bundle of major league flotsam in Alfonso Soriano and Mark Reynolds. Red Sox fans know how this works. There is no batter so dangerous as the one hitting nothing/nothing/nothing that finds his way to the Yankees. Reynolds homered off of Doubront into the Monster seats in the second for two runs, and Soriano added three more in the third.
Add in a Soriano RBI single in the first, and a Robinson Cano single that made good on an Eduardo Nunez triple in the fourth, and you've got seven early runs. The Red Sox have made some dramatic comebacks this year, but the way they'd been hitting of late, and the way Pettitte had stifled them through the first three, there wasn't much question of how this game was going to turn out.
Ultimately the Red Sox would put a few runs on the board, at least. They even went 3-for-6 with runners in scoring position--a conversion rate which easily would have provided a win last night. But pegging the Yankees back for one in the fourth, and picking up a pair of runs in the seventh was not enough, particularly with Mike Carp being called out on a pitch about six inches off the plate to end the latter inning with the bases loaded. No, the umpires didn't cost them this game, but with the Red Sox suffering through a really frustrating run of baseball, it was certainly fitting that the league's most obnoxious flaw went ahead and made itself known again.
The cherry on top: Drake Britton giving up three runs in the ninth to complete a perfectly awful game.
The Red Sox have been here before. They went 2-9 early on in May, and rebounded very nicely from that. But with the division lead down to one game from a high of four just three days back, the cushion the Sox built that might allow for something like this is gone. It's time to turn it around, or they'll soon find themselves needing to dig their way out of a self-made hole.