Red Sox 4, Blue Jays 5: Five straight

The Red Sox are now losers of five straight games after a 5-4 extra-innings loss against the Toronto Blue Jays Saturday afternoon. And the only thing that's really surprising is that this is their longest losing streak of the season.

For Clay Buchholz, it was a second straight step backward on the mound, if not so bad as his last. Much like his start against Oakland, Buchholz found himself the victim of three second-inning runs. It wasn't exactly the loudest of rallies, just one of those ones which doesn't seem to end. The Jays led off the frame with three straight singles--two of them coming on the ground--and while Buchholz was able to get a potentially major strikeout of Justin Smoak, both Kevin Pillar and Ryan Goins added base knocks of their own to score the runs.

Buchholz was able to keep the Jays off the board in the third, but in the fourth it was again death by small cuts, with another three singles--all coming with two outs--allowing the Jays to build their lead to 4-0.

The Red Sox would actually put up a fight in the bottom half of the inning. Xander Bogaerts scored Hanley Ramirez from second after a single from the left fielder and a David Ortiz walk, with Pablo Sandoval driving them both in with a base hit of his own after a passed ball from Russell Martin.

That left the Red Sox behind by just a run, and to Clay Buchholz' credit, he didn't allow that lead to get any bigger, providing that rare "shutdown inning" with the help of a double play and then handling the sixth without trouble. That left the Sox in a position to tie the game in the bottom of the sixth, when David Ortiz went deep for the second time in three starts, taking R.A. Dickey deep to right field to knot it at four a piece.

The Jays and Sox would trade zeroes through the end of nine, bringing Matt Barnes into the game in the tenth just one day after his awful performance had contributed heavily to Boston surrendering an 8-1 lead against these same Jays. This outing went better, but was still not enough. After a scoreless tenth, Barnes surrendered a leadoff solo shot to Martin in the eleventh, leaving the Red Sox losers again when they couldn't push a run across in the bottom half of the inning.