The Red Sox have the look of a club that’s teetering on the brink.
Its pitching staff decimated by injuries, the Red Sox turned to Matt Dermody to start Thursday’s series finale against the Cleveland Guardians, opting for the career minor leaguer rather than anyone else who may have been available.
The move immediately prompted an outpouring of criticism given Dermody’s past history of bigoted social media activity, and on top of that Red Sox manager Alex Cora also announced pregame that leadoff hitter Alex Verdugo was being benched for not running out a ground ball.
Needless to say, the vibes weren’t great when the Red Sox took the field at Progressive Field, and things only got worse once the game started.
Cleveland clobbered Boston 10-3 to take the series and knock the Red Sox below .500 for the first time since April 28. Slumping superstar Jose Ramirez led the charge with three home runs, and after Dermody was lifted following four innings Corey Kluber came in and got lit up for seven runs on 11 hits, eight of which came consecutively in a five-run bottom of the sixth.
“We lost the series and there was a lot of talk of stuff, but at the end of the day we have to move forward,” Cora said afterwards. “We have to cancel the noise and start playing good baseball. That’s the most important thing. We haven’t done that in a while.”
Ramirez tagged Dermody in each of his first two at-bats, the first a solo shot to left field in the first inning and the second a two-run blast to center in the third, which gave Cleveland a 3-0 lead.
Boston climbed back with an RBI single by Jarren Duran in the fifth and a towering solo home run by Triston Casas in the sixth, but then Cleveland opened the floodgates by smashing Kluber in a disastrous bottom of the sixth.
Ramirez led off the inning with his third home run, this one a solo shot to right field, and that wound up being the first of eight consecutive hits by Cleveland in the inning, four of which went for extra bases. The rally included a two-run double by Andres Giménez, an RBI triple by Myles Straw and an RBI single by Will Brennan, and it wasn’t until the ninth batter when Kluber finally forced an out on a deep fly ball to the warning track.
“It’s very tough,” Cora said. “Hit ball hard, off the end, check swings, it was like he couldn’t buy a break.”
Cleveland wound up scoring twice more in the eighth on a Brennan home run and a Ramirez fielder’s choice, and though Boston got a run back in the ninth on a Kiké Hernández RBI double, the game was essentially over by that point.
Following the game Cora announced that Dermody was being designated for assignment and there will likely be more roster moves to come. One of those will almost certainly be the activation of Adam Duvall from the 60-day IL, though Cora suggested the club will add at least one pitcher as well.
Dermody spoke following the game, calling his outing “subpar” and addressing his homophobic tweet from 2021, in which he asserted that gay people are going to go to hell.
“I do regret the tweet in the sense that it came off hurtful and it hurt a lot of people, and that’s the last thing I want to do is hurt people,” Dermody said. “A lot of people think that I’m against certain groups of people or whatnot, but I’m for everyone making it to heaven, and that’s my goal as a Christian.”
With Thursday’s loss the Red Sox are now 10-18 in their last 28 games and are 31-32 on the season. They are 14 games out of first place, five games back of the last American League playoff spot and will play six of their next nine games against the New York Yankees.
“It’s not the type of baseball we wanted to play, but here we are,” Cora said. “We’re going to New York and we have three games there, and we have to play well.”
