{"id":152987,"date":"2025-09-18T22:04:12","date_gmt":"2025-09-18T22:04:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/152987\/"},"modified":"2025-09-18T22:04:12","modified_gmt":"2025-09-18T22:04:12","slug":"red-soxs-loss-to-athletics-tightens-al-playoff-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/152987\/","title":{"rendered":"Red Sox’s loss to Athletics tightens AL playoff race"},"content":{"rendered":"

BOSTON — The AL playoff race is getting tighter for the Boston Red Sox<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Red Sox lost 5-3 to the Athletics<\/a> on Thursday, dropping the three-game series to the noncontending A’s and allowing the Cleveland Guardians<\/a> to crawl within 1\u00bd games of Boston in the AL wild-card race.<\/p>\n

The Red Sox are still in position for the third and final AL wild-card berth, but they fell 2 1\/2 games behind the Yankees<\/a> in the race for home-field advantage in the first round.<\/p>\n

Editor’s Picks<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n

1 Related<\/p>\n

“We control our own destiny,” manager Alex Cora said. “We’ve got to play better baseball. That’s it. There were signs today, but we’re not there yet.”<\/p>\n

Boston has lost five of its last seven games to turn what had been a good shot at edging the Yankees into a chance of missing out completely. Cora noted that in 2021, their last playoff appearance, the Red Sox had to rally at the end of the season.<\/p>\n

What did he learn from that season?<\/p>\n

“Don’t get too high. Don’t get too low,” Cora said. “It’s 162 (games) for a reason.”<\/p>\n

The Red Sox head to Tampa Bay for three games before three more in Toronto. They finish the season with a three-game series against the Tigers at Fenway Park.<\/p>\n

Cora insisted that there is no panic in the Boston clubhouse. On Saturday, he raised eyebrows when he responded to questions about postseason lineup construction by saying: “I think we should stop talking about October, to be honest with you.”<\/p>\n

“There’s a lot of stuff going on and we have to play better,” he said. “I’m not saying we’re in a bad spot. But we have to wait to see if October is part of this.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BOSTON — The AL playoff race is getting tighter for the Boston Red Sox. The Red Sox lost…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":152988,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[558],"tags":[64,63,591,85],"class_list":["post-152987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-mlb","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152987\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/152988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}