NEW YORK — You’d think the Red Sox would get a boost from the events of Friday night, but Saturday came and the Red Sox had nothing.

Their manager had put himself on the line — and may face a heavy fine or suspension — to protect David Ortiz’s argument on balls and strikes Friday night. The Red Sox might have bonded as a team in an us-against-the-umpires mantra, but the only thing that spilled into Saturday was more eye-rolling and bickering about balls and strikes, and, of course, a second straight loss to the Bombers before a packed house at Yankee Stadium.

Of course, it’s hard to get that boost when your ace pitcher, David Price, has been so bad. Any pumped-up feeling soon deflated when Price simply came out looking like an imposter, a shadow of his former self.

By this time he should have been “the event.’’ He should have been the guy who saves your team every five days. But it hasn’t turned out that way for Price or the Red Sox so far. Price’s performance Saturday in an 8-2 loss brought the team down.

You could see the confident faces of the past two weeks turn glum. Oh, everyone tried to say the right thing, but after all the hype about Price, his fastball just isn’t what it used to be. The scouts at the game were having a field day trying to dissect what on earth Price was doing on the mound, throwing backdoor sliders when he should be attacking with fastballs.

One scout reasoned, “He must know he has lost his fastball and had to adjust as a result. That’s the only explanation we have for what’s happening to him.’’

In addition to Price, the highest-scoring offense in baseball hasn’t been able to get untracked against Yankees pitching the last two games. They’re leaving men on base. They’re not taking advantage of obvious situations. They allowed Nathan Eovaldi to get the best of them and Eovaldi is capable of touching 100 miles per hour; that’s usually not a death sentence for Red Sox hitters who tend to catch up to hard throwers. But Eovaldi was pretty tough over eight innings, throwing 107 pitches, 77 for strikes. The Red Sox had only six hits, one of them Jackie Bradley Jr.’s solo home run.

After the surge in Chicago, beating a first-place team two out of three, losing consecutive games to a team that’s 11-17 was, to use an overstated word in these parts, deflating. You wonder if they’re starting to awaken a sleeping giant with the losses on a day when the Yankees still played without Alex­ Rodriguez, who is on the disabled list, and Jacoby Ellsbury, who has a sore hip.

Yet their seven through nine hitters — Chase Headley, Didi Gregorius, and Austin Romine — combined to go 7 for 11 with three runs, three doubles, and five RBIs.

The Yankees have played this series as if it was very important to them as there had already been talk about whom the Yankees might sell off at the trading deadline. Maybe these two games have given New York a boost. The Yankees have started to get it together and the Red Sox have allowed them to do it.

The head-scratcher here is there should have been some momentum for the Red Sox as a result of their Friday loss because they felt so violated by umpire Ron Kulpa’s balls and strikes calls. The whole team was upset about it.

So what do you think they would do about it? Sure, they all wanted to come out and erase the umpires from their memories and win the next game. But they weren’t able to accomplish that, mostly because of Price, but also because they couldn’t solve Eovaldi’s 95-100-m.p.h. velocity.

Manager John Farrell was still reeling from Kulpa’s strike zone before Saturday’s game, and while Kulpa actually praised Farrell for “trying to protect David Ortiz and doing what a manager is supposed to do,’’ Farrell wasn’t buying it and said the feeling wasn’t mutual.

Farrell likely awaits a fine or a possible suspension for his behavior. He not only gave Kulpa the heave-ho gesture, he refused to go into the clubhouse and watched the remainder of the game from the dugout after he’d been told to exit the dugout.

The Sox clubhouse emptied quickly after the game on Saturday and it was quiet. Xander Bogaerts talked about how the team has had a good road trip and how they need to win Sunday’s game to go back to Boston on a positive note. The Red Sox lost their first road series of the season as a result of the two losses here and are now 9-6 on the road. Not bad. But the Red Sox were hoping to keep the Yankees down.

They hadn’t lost back-to-back games since April 18-19, that’s how good things had been going.

There was so much confidence coming into this game. Price had a six-game winning streak at Yankee Stadium. He was 14-8 against the Yankees and 8-3 against them at Yankee Stadium.

You could just see the disappointment from Farrell after the game. You could see it in Price. You could just see a team that had been feeling so good after fighting so hard to get to first place suddenly dealing with disappointment again.

Bogaerts talked about Price being one pitch away, but really it was far more than that. Just as the Sox offense was more than one hit away from turning around the fortunes of this game.

Friday night could have been more than an entertaining ninth inning.

It could have been a momentum-builder, a game-changer. But it was nothing but another loss.

Nick Cafardo can be reached at cafardo@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @nickcafardo.