I don't know what to say about this game. I don't.
The Red Sox lost.
The Red Sox lost to the White Sox, 2-1.
The Red Sox lost to the White Sox, 2-1, on a walkoff error by Xander Bogaerts.
The Red Sox lost to the White Sox, 2-1, on a walkoff error by Xander Bogaerts, and Mike Napoli has a dislocated ring finger.
The Red Sox should have won tonight. Not in the way they should have won in the first game of the season of the Orioles, where they outplayed their opponents but seemed to have every bit of random chance go against them. They should have won this game because they had Jake Peavy firing on all cylinders against a rookie who, while a good prospect, was sitting on a 9.58 ERA headed into the game.
Instead they managed to put on such a poor performance on a cold Chicago night that it might even be called a caricature of the 2014 Sox to date. The defense was laughable, with Grady Sizemore misplaying a fly ball into a double and Xander Bogaerts being bailed out on a bad throw to first that pulled Mike Napoli off the bag by another botched replay call. That replay call would cost the White Sox a run as Adam Dunn took Jake Peavy deep in typical Adam Dunn fashion immediately thereafter, making the walkoff error some kind of bizarre karmic payoff depending on how you look at it.
Meanwhile, at the plate, they struck out 12 times, looking foolish time and again as they chased pitches that started and ended out of the strike zone. The Red Sox have, by all appearances, forgotten how to be the Red Sox, and it's just plain painful to watch.
We can look for whatever silver linings we want. Jake Peavy had excellent movement and, while his outing was cut short by a number of long at bats, managed to keep the Red Sox alive in the game until Daniel Nava finally decided to give the whole BABIP thing a miss and just hit another one out of the park to tie the game and give the Red Sox the chance to lose in the ninth. The bullpen, too, was pretty effective, and would have had the Sox into extras but for the defense.
We can also rationalize this bad start however we like. We can talk about the injuries the team is facing. We can chalk this all up to small sample sizes allowing any team to look like the best or worst in the game.
But no matter how you look at it, these Red Sox are just plain bad at the moment. They're playing terrible, terrible baseball, and it's not limited to the players who will be left on the sidelines when the likes of Dustin Pedroia and Shane Victorino return. They're a nine-inning exercise in depression right now, And to put it simply: that really, really sucks.
They'll play again tomorrow. And the day after that. And maybe in one of these next few games something will change. But for each game it doesn't, the hole is going to get deeper, and it's going to take longer and longer to get to a point where they even have a foundation to really build on. Each loss is going to carry that much more weight while .500 is a goal rather than a lower limit, and the pressure is just going to build.
Is 5-9 bad enough to panic over? I don't know, but it's certainly enough for concern.