BOSTON — The Red Sox will wear their yellow jerseys Monday against the Royals. It was clubhouse manager Tommy McLaughlin’s idea.
“Tommy made the right call right away. Yeah. In case of an emergency, wear yellow,” manager Alex Cora joked.
It’s emergency time. The Red Sox suffered a three-game sweep at home over the weekend against the Blue Jays, dropping their playoff odds to 10.5%, per Fangraphs.
“Those guys,” Cora said about the Blue Jays, “they just put it on us from pitch one of the series. You’ve got to tip your hat to them.”
So why not break out the yellow jerseys Monday for the first game of a four-game series vs. Kansas City? Boston is 21-4 all-time when it wears the yellows, including posting nine straight victories when wearing them.
The Red Sox have lost seven of their past eight games after going 22-12 from June 14-July 28. It has been a hot-and-cold season. Boston was 21-14 on May 6 after an eight-game winning streak but it dropped below .500 by June 8. The Red Sox were 39-35 on June 20 after winning six straight games but they dropped below .500 eight days later.
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“We’ve been through this the whole season,” Cora said. “Do we like it? We hate it. We’ve been … on this roller coaster the whole time. We’ve won a lot of games in a row and then we go through stretches where we don’t win games consistently. We don’t have to go too far to understand how it works. It works going out there, taking care of the baseball, running the bases better, putting better at-bats and pitching. That’s the nature of the game. And we’ve been really good at one point and we’ve been really bad at others.”
Boston’s stretch of seven losses in eight games began in San Francisco, but Cora said, “I felt we played great in San Fran, just lost two out of three on walkoffs.”
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The Red Sox defense has been awful all season. Boston is 26th in the major leagues in defensive runs saved (negative-21), per Fangraphs. The offense also has gone cold recently. Boston has scored three or fewer runs in seven of their past nine games.
“We’ve been through this before,” Cora said. “It’s not going to change our mindset. We’ve just gotta be ready. Just play clean baseball and things are going to start changing. Hopefully Tommy made the right choice of colors and then we play good baseball and we go from there.”
