Red Sox remain perfectly mediocre, and Alex Cora isn't sugarcoating anything

BOSTON -- If there was one positive about the Red Sox' blowout loss on Tuesday night against the visiting Miami Marlins, it was that the 10-1 drubbing only took up two hours and 34 minutes of everybody's time. With the way the Red Sox have been going -- sitting near .500, going on a lengthy winning streak, losing six out of eight, rinse, repeat -- we can at least appreciate when they take care of business in a timely fashion.

This particular loss was noteworthy though, because it dropped the Red Sox to 40-40 on the season, one day ahead of the exact midway point of their season.

Forty wins. Forty losses. A plus-12 run differential. A 21-19 record at home, a 19-21 record on the road.

The picture of mediocrity.

That's not a criticism, necessarily, as much as it is a statement of fact. And even manager Alex Cora wouldn't argue with that description of his ballclub.

"40 and 40, yeah. I mean, no more, no less. Like I said, we're not great. We're not bad. We are where we're at," Cora said after Tuesday's loss. "Obviously, we've got a long ways to go. Tomorrow is the halfway game of the season, right? And we've just gotta be better, man. That's the bottom line. We've got a lot of work to do."

It's a nearly identical comment to the one Cora made on June 6, when the Red Sox lost to fall to 30-30.

"We're playing .500 right now," Cora said while sitting in the same room at Fenway Park 21 days earlier. "Like I said yesterday, are we great? No. Are we bad? No. This is where we're at. When the season started a while ago, we were 0-0. And now we're 30-30. So 60 games under our belt and we've still got plenty of them."

At that time, Cora said the Red Sox needed to clean up their defense in order to improve. This time ... he had the same message.

"Yeah, I mean, we've gotta keep talking to them. I mean, we talked about it today, and we did it again," Cora said Tuesday regarding the team's sloppy defense. "And we'll talk about it tomorrow. And that's the only way we can do it. We can take all the infield in the world and we can take ground balls like we've been doing since spring training. There's nothing new. We've been doing this from the get-go. But, you know, decisions in the game, we've gotta be smarter. It's on us to keep talking and keep preaching and showing them, and hopefully we can start making better decisions out there."

Tuesday's loss kept the Red Sox relatively deep in last place in the AL East, three games behind fourth-place Toronto, 3.5 games behind the third-place Yankees, nine games behind second-place Baltimore, and a distant 13 games behind the first-place Rays. They remain in the bloated wild-card hunt, sitting 3.5 games behind the Angels, but with two teams -- Toronto and Houston -- ahead of them in the standings.

They're technically in the playoff hunt ... but what does that really mean?

A year ago on this date, the Red Sox actually held the second wild-card position, with a one-game lead over Tampa and a three-game lead over Cleveland. But after a 5-14 start to July, they had fallen out of playoff position, three games out of the third wild card, with Cleveland still ahead of them. A four-game winning streak from the end of August into the start of September brought Boston to 67-68 on the season, but they were still 7.5 games out of a wild-card spot. They'd never be that close to .500 again, finishing the season on an 11-16 run to end the year at 78-84.

That is to say the Red Sox were in a similar position last year -- actually, a better position -- but they fundamentally were not a great baseball team. By the end of the year, that much was undeniable. They finished in last place in their division, five games out of fourth place. And they finished in 10th place in the American League, eight games out of a playoff spot. That final spot went to the Rays, who were 10 games over .500. The Red Sox were six games under. 

A year later, is there reason to believe that this year's team -- which doesn't have Xander Bogaerts, J.D. Martinez, Christian Vazquez, Nathan Eovaldi, Michael Wacha, etc. -- will manage to create a better fate?

According to Cora, it'll be determined by defense.

"We have to grind at-bats. But I do believe if we're gonna get rolling, you know ... if we play good defense, we win games," he said. "And when we give the opposition an extra 90 [feet], we don't make plays, we don't turn double plays, we put ourselves in a bad spot. Our pitchers, for how good they are, they're not like a swing-and-miss staff. And we have to make plays, and we have to make sure we limit the damage. And we didn't do it today."

The wider picture shows the Red Sox with an above-average offense, ranking seventh in the majors for runs scored and OPS. They're below average in homers, ranking 20th in that category, but they lead the league in doubles and rank sixth in team OBP. In terms of pitching, they're well below average, ranking 24th in team ERA. They rank 18th in WHIP, 15th in strikeouts, and 23rd in opponents' batting average. They also rank 21st in quality starts and 15th in strikeouts. It's uninspiring.

Defense is unquestionably a problem, with Boston ranking second-to-last in team fielding percentage at .982. Kiké Hernández, whom Chaim Bloom believed could fill the shoes of Bogaerts, still leads all of baseball with 14 errors. As a team, they rank 24th in defensive runs saved at minus-19. And they rank dead last in outs above average at minus-23. (The Twins, the second-worst team, are at minus-17.)

To Cora's point, the Red Sox could certainly stand to play some cleaner and crisper defense. There's been some evidence this year that when they run a tight ship in the field, they win more often than not.

But it might not be so simple. Boston's defense may not have been sharp on Tuesday, but the 10-1 loss had more to do with Garrett Whitlock giving up three runs in the first inning and the Boston bats mustering just six hits and one run in seven innings against Sandy Alcantara than it did with some missed plays in the field. The Red Sox went 1-for-7 with runners in scoring position, with that lone RBI hit coming in the first inning. After Alex Verdugo doubled home Justin Turner in the first inning, zero Red Sox made it past first base until the bottom of the seventh inning. 

Nine Gold Glovers in the field couldn't have turned that game into a victory. And that's kind of where the Red Sox find themselves.

They're OK. 

At 30-30, Alex Cora admitted as much. At 40-40, he did it again. The question is, when the Red Sox play their 100th game of the season on or about July 23 (pending rainouts), will the record reflect a team that is anything more than mediocre? The results of the last 12 months should temper any and all expectations for that answer ending up in the affirmative.