Red Sox react after latest loss drops them to 1-5

“Unacceptable,” said shortstop Trevor Story, who was 0-for-5 with three strikeouts and an error.

“Not good,” said manager Alex Cora.

The team sat in stunned silence in the clubhouse following Wednesday’s defeat. Panic accomplishes little in the initial days of a 162-game endurance test, but history suggests a poor start also can’t simply be met with a shrug.

The Red Sox have had one or no wins through the first six games of the season 14 previous times in franchise history. They’ve missed the playoffs in every instance.

The last six times when the team endured such a dramatic face-plant out of the blocks, their season concluded with organizational shakeups that concluded with the departure of the head of baseball operations (2019, Dave Dombrowski; 1958, Joe Cronin), the manager (2012, Bobby Valentine; 1996, Kevin Kennedy; 1966, Billy Herman), or both (2011, Terry Francona and Theo Epstein).

Precedents aren’t prisons, and the expansion of the playoff field provides teams greater latitude to find their footing. Nonetheless, the Sox didn’t sugarcoat their situation.

“We know we can be good,” said Story. “It’s just about us, the players, to make the adjustments that we need to make. We have time on our side, but there’s urgency, for sure, that this is unacceptable.”

After a competitive three-game series in Cincinnati to open the season, the Red Sox were thrashed in Houston, getting outscored 23-7 while leading for exactly one-half of an inning across the three contests.

“Mismatch,” one scout summarized of the appearance of the two teams.

The Sox looked awful in virtually every facet. Some lowlights:

⋅ The Red Sox have scored 17 runs through six games, their fewest since they plated 16 runs during their 0-6 start in 2011.

“We have a lot of good hitters, but we’re not moving the line the way we should, and that’s how our offense is built,” said Story.

⋅ After the Red Sox posted a 23 percent strikeout rate (10th-highest in MLB) last year, they vowed to put the ball in play more often. Instead, they’ve struck out at a 29 percent clip over the first six games of the season.

A major culprit of their strikeouts: They’ve been particularly bad on the pitches they should handle. They’ve been passive on pitches in the strike zone — entering Wednesday, they had swung at 59 percent of such pitches, the lowest rate in the big leagues — and doing little when they do swing, resulting in a 20 percent in-zone whiff rate that was ninth-highest in the big leagues entering Wednesday.

“We’re striking out a lot. We’re getting beat in the zone,” said Cora. “[The Astros] made some good pitches, but at one point you cannot give the opposition too much credit, right? It’s on us.”

⋅ The pitching staff — the anticipated strength of the team — got shelled, posting a 4.91 ERA through the first half-dozen games while giving up 11 homers, tied for second-most in the big leagues.

⋅ The defense was sloppy, committing six errors during the trip. Story had a grounder skip under his glove for an unearned run in the first inning on Wednesday. Tuesday featured a chaotic double error in which Brayan Bello made a diving attempt to cut off a throw to the plate by Marcelo Mayer. Connor Wong skipped throws to second for errors on back-to-back days.

⋅ On the double error, the Red Sox bench lost track of the count, and failed to correct home plate umpire Mark Wegner when he mistakenly reset an at-bat of Bello against Cam Smith with a 1-1 count instead of an 0-2 count. The result? Instead of a strikeout when Smith swung and missed at the next pitch, the Astros outfielder worked a nine-pitch walk.

“We have to be better than that. I take full blame,” said Cora.

⋅ The team’s decision-making in the initial days of the automatic ball-strike challenge system was suspect, with misguided, low-leverage challenges by Carlos Narváez, Roman Anthony, and Ceddanne Rafaela.

⋅ Catcher Carlos Narváez was benched on Wednesday for an unspecified reason.

The cumulative impact of those myriad demonstrations of bad baseball was a bewildered team preparing for a Fenway opener that will be played in front of a fanbase whose skepticism has been stoked. A 1-5 record makes for an awkward introduction of the 2026 team.

“The last thing we can do is listen to the outside noise and panic,” said Roman Anthony, whose pinch-hit homer in the ninth inning of Wednesday’s loss offered a glint of optimism. “We expect to win every game and to win every series that we can. Anything other than that to us is a failure. … [But] there’s got to be some sort of understanding, like, ‘Hey, boys, we’re going to be all right. We’ve played two series here.’”

“We have a lot more games left,” added Story. “I try to look at things in a positive sense. Maybe this is good that this is happening now, a little gut check, and we figure it out, we make the adjustments. We know we have a great team.”

There’s little time for the 2026 Red Sox to spare before they must start proving it.

Alex Speier can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @alexspeier.