{"id":196722,"date":"2025-07-23T09:04:12","date_gmt":"2025-07-23T09:04:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/196722\/"},"modified":"2025-07-23T09:04:12","modified_gmt":"2025-07-23T09:04:12","slug":"alex-cora-gives-blunt-assessment-of-red-soxs-recent-hitting-woes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/196722\/","title":{"rendered":"Alex Cora Gives Blunt Assessment Of Red Sox&#8217;s Recent Hitting Woes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Philadelphia Phillies have one of the best starting rotations in baseball, and the Boston Red Sox are finding that out the hard way.<\/p>\n<p>The Red Sox haven\u2019t been able to muster much offense during the first two games of their road series with the Phillies this week, managing just three runs and 12 hits in the two games combined (both losses). After scoring two runs on eight hits in <a href=\"https:\/\/nesn.com\/2025\/07\/red-sox-lose-series-opener-to-phillies-in-historically-bizarre-fashion\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Monday\u2019s fluky 3-2 loss<\/a>, they tallied only one run on four hits in Tuesday\u2019s 4-1 defeat.<\/p>\n<p>Boston\u2019s bats have been overwhelmed by Philadelphia\u2019s starting pitching. Zack Wheeler and  Cristopher S\u00e1nchez yielded just three runs while racking up 22 strikeouts in 15 innings.<\/p>\n<p>Following S\u00e1nchez\u2019s complete-game masterpiece on Tuesday, <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/NESN\/status\/1947835055306404081\" rel=\"nofollow\">Alex Cora gave a blunt assessment<\/a> of his team\u2019s recent offensive woes.<\/p>\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Alex Cora on the Red Sox struggles against top major league pitchers<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;If we wanna play in October we have to find a way to hit those guys.&#8221; <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/rKC8ecHw2b\" rel=\"nofollow\">pic.twitter.com\/rKC8ecHw2b<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 NESN (@NESN) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/NESN\/status\/1947835055306404081?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">July 23, 2025<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u201cTwo of the best pitchers in the big leagues. That\u2019s the reason they\u2019re good,\u201d Cora said after Tuesday\u2019s loss. \u201cIf we want to play in October, we have to find a way to hit those guys.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"nesn-in-content-ad__copy\">Story continues below advertisement<\/p>\n<p>One issue for the Red Sox is that their rookies had never faced Wheeler or S\u00e1nchez before, making a difficult assignment even tougher.<\/p>\n<p>Still, Boston\u2019s lineup has been cold for a while now, dating back to before the All-Star Break. The Red Sox have scored two runs or fewer in five of their last seven games, averaging 2.1 runs per game and going 3-4 during that span.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>After <a href=\"https:\/\/nesn.com\/2025\/07\/red-sox-send-hapless-rockies-to-worst-mlb-start-since-1916\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">destroying the Colorado Rockies<\/a> and Washington Nationals a few weeks ago, Boston still needs to prove it can hit quality pitching. That will be essential if this team wants to make the playoffs and make a deep run in October.<\/p>\n<p class=\"nesn-in-content-ad__copy\">Story continues below advertisement<\/p>\n<p>The Red Sox will try to salvage the series finale and avoid the sweep on Wednesday against Jes\u00fas Luzardo, who\u2019s 8-5 with a 4.29 ERA, a 2.87 FIP and the seventh-most strikeouts in the National League. Boston will counter with Lucas Giolto, who\u2019s 6-2 with a 3.59 ERA.<\/p>\n<p>\t<script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Philadelphia Phillies have one of the best starting rotations in baseball, and the Boston Red Sox are&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":131412,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2375],"tags":[858,5,141,48,2542,4,89,2543],"class_list":{"0":"post-196722","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boston-red-sox","8":"tag-alex-cora","9":"tag-baseball","10":"tag-boston","11":"tag-boston-red-sox","12":"tag-bostonredsox","13":"tag-mlb","14":"tag-red-sox","15":"tag-redsox"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/114901750277087788","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196722"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196722\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/131412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}