If Friday was supposed to be a spark, then the Sox were trying to start a fire with 5 giant logs and no kindling. The spark was extinguished by the 2nd inning of the next game and the Sox ended up a full game back in the Wild Card race heading up to the dome of horrors in Toronto. (You don’t want to know how far back they are in the division. It’ll just make you cry.)

There’s the 6.75 ERA from the starters in the last two games of the series that you can blame, or the lovely 0-10 performance with runners in scoring position. But ever since the all-star break, I think it boils down to this: when the 2009 Red Sox are in sync, they’re a playoff team. When they’re not, they’re at-best a .500 team.

Break the game down into the following three areas: hitting, starting pitching and bullpen. You generally need two of those areas to play well if you want to win a game. Although, if the starting pitcher is truly awful (see Smoltz, John), then you can ignore this whole theory since the game is probably already lost. Sure, sometimes you’ll get all three and the game will be a cakewalk. And sometimes you can win with just one of three. But to win most games, you need either fantastic pitching from start to finish, or a good start and good enough offense to overcome a bullpen collapse, or to score enough runs to overcome a bad hangover from your starter and then ride the bullpen to close out the game. Someone needs to remind the Sox that this is not a 3 groups, 3 cabs game. They need to put everything together for a shot at October, and they’d better do it soon.