For Red Sox, dismal divisional performance has season in jeopardy
Even as the Red Sox acknowledge the possibility of becoming deadline sellers this year, they are far from committing to such a path. The team’s decision makers still hope the club will forge a run to prove itself worthy of reinforcements rather than subtractions leading up to the Aug. 3 trade deadline.
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In order for that to happen, however, the Sox must address a key factor in their plummet towards the bottom of the American League: To this point, the Sox have been chum in the AL East waters.
If the Red Sox had merely been mediocre within the American League East, their 2026 season wouldn’t be imperiled. The club’s 23-26 mark outside the division is hardly spectacular, but given that a .500 record right now is good enough to hold an AL wild-card spot, it’s not disqualifying.
But after Tuesday’s 6-1 loss to the Blue Jays, the Sox have a horrendous 6-15 mark against divisional opponents – the second-worst record by any AL team within its own division. (Only the Tigers, with a 6-16 mark against the AL Central, had an inferior mark.)
The club has split series against the Orioles en route to a 3-3 mark, is 1-3 against the Blue Jays, and has gotten thrashed by the Rays (1-5) and Yankees (1-4). The Sox have won just one of their seven series within the division, going 1-5-1 prior to the current set of games against the Blue Jays at Fenway.
Context: The club’s .286 winning percentage would be the worst by the Sox within the AL East since the division format was introduced in 1969, surpassing the 2022 season (26-50, .342) as the worst in franchise history against the team’s primary opponents.
The team’s struggles within the division are made more jarring by the fact that preseason expectations of a divisional Group of Death have not materialized. Though the Yankees own the best record in the American League, they’re currently without Aaron Judge. The Rays owned a 41-28 record entering Tuesday, but their run differential (plus-7) suggests a team that’s hardly a juggernaut. The Blue Jays (34-38) and Orioles (34-39) both have been disappointments.
“The American League in general, everybody’s kind of finding their way,” said Sox interim manager Chad Tracy, who noted that the starting pitching across the division has been formidable. “I think more often than not, we run into teams [in the AL East] that you look at close and we feel like they’ve got some issues as well.”
And yet the Sox have been unable to hold their ground against the teams they will face the most. Any hopes of avoiding a selloff will require the Sox to prove they can beat a demographic that has flattened them.
After Tuesday, 40 games will remain before the trade deadline. Of those, 16 (40 percent) will come within the division. It will be almost impossible for the Sox to make any headway in the wild-card race if they prove unable to assert themselves as at least the equals of their AL East counterparts.
For all the struggles and vulnerabilities of the division to date, improvement by the Sox against the AL East would be no small feat. After all, beyond the rotation talent that Tracy cited — a notion reinforced by the presence of AL strikeout leader Dylan Cease on the mound for the Blue Jays on Tuesday — there’s still considerable talent throughout the division.
“The AL East win-loss record isn’t what it was expected to be, or certainly what it normally is, but the talent still feels so real day in and day out to us, and certainly to me,” said Blue Jays GM Ross Atkins.
This is the reality of the deep hole in which the Red Sox find themselves. The list of issues they must correct is considerable, from their gruesome performance at Fenway (12-23) to their thin lineup (16 games scoring 1 run or less, tied for the most such contests in the AL) to their inability to mount comebacks (9-30 when opponents score first, 1-35 when trailing after 7 innings, 0-38 when trailing after 8 frames).
Improvement will require a period in which those season-long deficiencies suddenly — even if temporarily — vanish. The same is true of the team’s struggles within the division.
“Things have not gone the way we want them to, but [the situation] is still not insurmountable if we can get ourselves going,” said Tracy. “But at the same time, you’ve got to go. There’s got to be a stretch.”
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