The Red Sox were run out of Fenway Park Sunday afternoon in a 15-7 beatdown at the hands of the Jays.
The man who will rightfully take the lion's share of the blame is the man the Sox were depending on to come out of his season-long funk when they needed him the most: Jon Lester. Instead of responding to the desperate circumstances, however, Lester simply crumbled.
The very first pitch of the game would be taken out of the park, and the Jays were off to the races. A walk, a bunt single to Nick Punto, and a sharp line drive to right that hopped up into the seats put two men on with another run in. J.P. Arencibia would make it 3-0 with an RBI ground out, and Rajai Davis 4-0 by doubling to left.
The Sox would strike back in the bottom of the first, providing this game with one of a sparse few silver linings when Adrian Gonzalez went deep to right with two runners on to make it a two-run game. That was as close as the Sox would get, however, and it would not last long. Lester would walk two in the second before allowing back-to-back homers, leaving all the Sox' deficit one run larger for all their efforts.
The scoring would take a short hiatus until the ninth, when Lester was finally chased after his fifth walk, fourth homer, and tenth and eleventh runs allowed on the night. Junichi Tazawa entered, and finally started recording outs, taking the Sox all the way to the eighth without allowing anything else to come in.
The Sox, meanwhile, got a few back, scoring once when Jacoby Ellsbury hit his first homer of the season, and then picking up two more after Rajai Davis lost a two-out fly ball in the sun field, allowing Ryan Sweeney to reach and extending the inning long enough for hits from Mike Aviles and Nick Punto to make it 11-7.
Unfortunately, all hopes of a rally would be extinguished by one unlucky eighth for Mark Melancon, who saw the bases loaded on an infield single, a ground ball past the bag at third, a sacrifice bunt gone for a hit, and a weak flair into right. Without allowing any really solid contact, Melancon was tagged for four big ones, putting the Red Sox in a hopelessly deep hole with too few innings left to recover.