Any doubt about the perilous road ahead for the Red Sox should now be vanquished.
For the first time in months, in the wake of their 3-1 loss to the Mariners on Wednesday, the Red Sox are not in possession of one of the five playoff spots in the American League. It should not come as an enormous surprise that the team’s slip came on the road.
The Red Sox are currently playing games very different from the ones to which they’re accustomed. The cooler, heavier night air of the West Coast is producing a very different kind of baseball, evident in a number of blasts that expired on the warning track, including one each from David Ortiz and Xander Bogaerts Wednesday night.
The contact-heavy approach that results in doubles pinging off the wall at Fenway — or homers that fly over it — yields fly outs on the road, creating a very different dynamic.
Make no mistake: The Red Sox remain a good lineup on the road. The team averages 4.89 runs per game away from Fenway, third best in the AL. They have the second-best road batting average (.264), second-best road OBP (.328), and top slugging mark (.440) among AL teams.
But even with those fine marks, they aren’t the offensive juggernaut that they’ve been for much of the year at home, where they average 5.95 runs per game. That divide underscores the significance of the Sox having more remaining road games (34) than any other team in baseball — four more than the Orioles, five more than the Blue Jays, and 10 more than the Tigers team that just surpassed the Sox for the second AL wild-card spot.
In 47 road games, the Sox have been held to two or fewer runs more often (14 times) than in 59 home games (13). And it is these sorts of low-scoring games that the Sox have been ill-equipped to win. They have won just two games all year (2-25) when scoring two runs; they are the only team in the majors without a win when scoring three runs (0-6).
The Red Sox received strong efforts from David Price on Tuesday and Rick Porcello on Wednesday. The two starters had little more than blips — for Price, a three-batter slip in the eighth inning, for Porcello, three solo homers. For much of the year, such starts seemed sufficient for victories at Fenway.
The road remains a different story. The offense doesn’t provide the same margin of error for blips.
As the Red Sox embarked on this road trip, manager John Farrell discussed the need for the pitching staff to deliver consistency. It has done that, allowing 21 runs in seven contests. But the offense has posted the same 3.0 runs per game that it has permitted, resulting in a 3-4 stretch that has the Sox trailing a Tigers team that will play the majority of its remaining games in a home park where it has dominated (31-19).
Through April and May, it seemed inevitable that there would come a point where the Boston offense no longer could carry the team through the season, where it would have to rely on its pitching staff not just to solidify but to assume primary responsibility for the team’s fortunes. With 34 of their remaining 56 games on the road, that point has arrived, with postseason hopes hanging in the balance.
Alex Speier can be reached at alex.speier@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @alexspeier.
