Red Sox 1, Rays 4: Three hits lose to three homers

The Red Sox kept up their trend of the past week: every loss followed by a win, and every win by a loss. With Friday providing a 4-3 extra innings win, Saturday brought with it a 4-1 no offense loss.

It was slow going from the beginning for the Sox against Matt Andriese. The rookie righty didn't allow a baserunner his first time through the order, and came awfully close to heading into the fifth with a perfect game intact before Xander Bogaerts broke things up with a solid single into right field.

That "threat", such as it was, would end just a few pitches later when David Ortiz made the third out on a fly ball to left. The lone single wouldn't unsettle him in the least, with Ortiz the first of another seven straight outs for Andriese before the Red Sox were finally granted relief by an awfully low pitch limit leading him to be pulled after the sixth.

For the first four innings, Wade Miley was up to the task of matching Andriese zero for zero. The Rays had a few more baserunners, but Miley worked around them by striking out the side in the first and inducing double plays in the second and third before returning to the strikeout with two in a 1-2-3 fourth.

Just when everyone was singing Miley's praises, however, he hit a speed bump. Asdrubal Cabrera led off the fifth with a triple to the gap in right-center, and if he was almost guaranteed to score at that point anyway, Miley let him come in in the worst way possible as Jake Elmore hooked a slider just around the foul pole in left field for a two-run shot.

Miley held the Rays to just those two runs, leaving the game with an out in the seventh in what was certainly a successful performance. But if the Red Sox were still close, they weren't about to mount a comeback. Alejandro De Aza would be the only bright spot on the day, homering to right off of Kevin Jepsen in the eighth to give the Red Sox their one run. But even if they had, Matt Barnes surrendered a pair of solo shots to Rene Rivera and Evan Longoria on too-straight fastballs to keep the Rays comfortably ahead.