Nothing went right for the Red Sox Saturday, as they fell to the Mariners 8-2 in game three of the four game series.
Nate Eovaldi went five, allowing five (four earned) in the loss. He struck out just three and allowed seven hits.
The Mariners were up early. Alex Verdugo missed a ball that he ‘should have caught,’ which led to a triple for Kyle Seager to make it 3-0 in the second inning.
“He hit the ball 419 feet,” Verdugo said. “Everyone wants to get mad and do all this, but sometimes this game is hard and balls do go the other way. At the end of the day, how many stadiums is that a home run? Yeah, I should have caught it and I understand it. But that’s not the reason why we lost. That’s not anything. It’s a good swing. It’s a hard play. And I think I should have caught it but at the end of the day, we don’t.”
Seager then scored on a wild pitch to make it 4-0, in just the second inning.
Xander Bogaerts would later make a crucial error in the fifth, and a run would score to make it 5-0.
Three runs would be scattered across the eighth and ninth inning for the Mariners. The Red Sox lone runs came off of an RBI single from Marwin Gonzalez in the seventh and an RBI double from Rafael Devers in the ninth.
Chris Flexen shuffled through the Red Sox lineup with ease. He allowed just one run off four hits with a career-high seven K’s.
“I think he did a really good job of just mixing up his pitches,” Verdugo said, after going 1-for-3 off Flexen. “Just attacking different parts of the zone, working the cutter away from righties and into the lefties. The fastball was kind of riding to the righties up and away, and just did a good job of mixing his pitches. He pitched. You can’t get mad at that. He’s a guy that if you try to get a little big on him, you try to get a little anxious, it plays into his game.”
The Red Sox fall to 12-9 on the year, and 7-8 at Fenway. The club is 56-71 at home since 2019.