NEW YORK — Red Sox manager Ron Roenicke met with his forlorn pitching staff before Saturday night’s game against the Yankees and presented them with what he thought was good news.
Roenicke and pitching coach Dave Bush said they planned to use the pitchers in better-defined roles moving forward. The idea was to give them an opportunity to re-set after a string of terrible games.
“Just try and ease their minds a little bit. Trying to free them up and get them to stop pressing and be themselves,” Roenicke said.
But it somehow got worse. Nate Eovaldi had his worst start as a member of the Sox in an 11-5 loss.
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That’s six consecutive losses for the 6-15 Red Sox. They have allowed eight or more runs in each of those games, a staggering 38 in the last three. The team’s earned run average has swelled to 6.09.
“It sucks. It’s definitely not fun,” said J.D. Martinez, who saw two hits and two RBIs wasted. “It’s not fun going out there and getting your head beat in every day.”
Clint Frazier homered and drove in five runs for the Yankees. Gio Urshela and Gary Sanchez also homered as Eovaldi allowed eight runs over 5⅓ innings.
The Sox are planning to call up Chris Mazza to face the first-place Yankees on Sunday night in what would be his first major league start. He’ll be the 11th starter tried in 22 games.
“We need to start playing good baseball. We’re not playing good baseball,” said Roenicke, who night after night takes the heat for roster decisions made above him. “We’re lacking in something it seems like every day. We don’t play good defense one day and then we don’t hit another day or we don’t pitch.”
As the Red Sox stagger, the Yankees feast. They are 5-0 against the Sox this season, scoring 40 runs. The Yankees had 11 hits off Eovaldi and three relievers, eight for extra bases.
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The Sox have lost 13 of the last 14 games between the teams including eight in a row for the first time since 1985.
Eovaldi was one of the heroes of the 2018 championship run and was rewarded with a four-year, $68 million contract. He is 3-3 with a 6.32 ERA in 28 games since.
“It’s extremely frustrating, for sure,” Eovaldi said.
Eovaldi took a 3-2 lead into the fourth inning and to that point had thrown only 40 pitches.
With two outs and a runner on first, he got ahead of Sanchez 0 and 2. Sanchez came into the game having struck out in 44 percent of his plate appearances this season.
The third pitch was just off the plate and Sanchez took it. Sanchez fouled off a cutter to stay alive then appeared to have struck out when he took a curveball at the bottom of the strike zone.
Umpire Jansen Visconti didn’t call it, which drew some comments from the Red Sox dugout audible in the press box.
The next pitch was a splitter that stayed over the plate and Sanchez hit it 391 feet into the left-field seats. It was his fourth home run of the season, the second in as many games.
“I felt like there were a couple of close calls,” Eovaldi said. “I felt like I made a lot of really good pitches tonight and I felt like they laid off a lot of those as well.”
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Eovaldi wasn’t unlucky in the sixth inning. He just pitched poorly.
In a 4-3 game, Eovaldi allowed a leadoff single by Gleyber Torres and a double into the right-field corner by Mike Tauchman. This time, Eovaldi struck out Sanchez. But Frazier drove the first pitch he saw — a cutter that did nothing — into the right-field stands for his second home run.
When Brett Gardner doubled, that was it for Eovaldi. Gardner scored when Tyler Wade doubled off Heath Hembree.
Matt Barnes, who hadn’t pitched since last Sunday, started the seventh inning and allowed three runs, two on a single by Frazier.
Yankees starter James Paxton (1-1) wasn’t particularly impressive, allowing three runs on six hits over five innings. All three runs came in the third inning.
Martinez drove in two runs with a sharply hit ball down the left-field line but was thrown out going to second. The next hitter, Xander Bogaerts, homered to left field.
Tauchman, the left fielder, settled under the ball on the warning track then watched it clear the wall. It was fourth of the year for Bogaerts, one of the few Sox players who has met expectations.
The Sox hitters start every game knowing even six or seven runs may not be enough. They’ve averaged five runs in the losing streak.
“I think we’ve got to refocus and go out there and do the best we can do,” Martinez said. “I feel like our offense has been putting up runs. It is what it is.”
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Peter Abraham can be reached at peter.abraham@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @PeteAbe.
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Yankees rough up Red Sox again, continue domination of rivalry - The Boston Globe
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