Buckley: Do Red Sox players even care anymore?

The Boston Red Sox didn’t do much more than browse the aisles at the trade deadline, so it wasn’t unfair to ask if chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom believes his players have what it takes to make a playoff run.

Based on what took place at Fenway Park on Saturday afternoon, it’s not unfair to ask if the players believe they have what it takes to make a playoff run.

To put it another way: Do they even give a damn?

It was bad enough that the Red Sox delivered their daily dose of horrendous base running, with a 5-4 loss being stamped into the books after Reese McGuire raced around third on a Connor Wong fly to left-center, only to be doubled-up at second when Kevin Kiermaier made the catch. Another walk-off boner by the Red Sox.

By now, Sox fans more or less expect this kind of nonsense. It’s practically stamped on their tickets. What they don’t expect, what they don’t deserve, what no fans in any market deserve, is for a key player to be benched because … well, just because.

Come on down, Alex Verdugo.

Or: Sit down, Alex Verdugo.

Less than a month ago, Verdugo was making it known he wasn’t happy to be left off the American League All-Star team. Saturday afternoon at Fenway, Verdugo was a late scratch from the lineup, apparently for showing up late. When asked for his reaction, Bloom texted The Athletic, “I support AC’s decision 100%.”

After the game, Red Sox manager Alex Cora made his displeasure known — and it had nothing to do with All-Star rosters.

“He didn’t play today,” Cora said. “I decided not to play him. I think today we took a step back as a team … we have to make sure everybody’s available every single day here for us to get to wherever we’re going to go. And that wasn’t the case. And as a manager, I gotta take charge of this, and I decided he wasn’t gonna play.”

There was more.

“This is probably one of my worst days here in this organization,” Cora said. “Because from day one, everybody has been available — from day one. We had our issues, whatever, and we have taken care of our things, but today … we took a step back. You know, I feel responsible because I’m the leader of this team, and it’s hard. It’s hard, but we’ll show up tomorrow and we’re gonna grind again. We’re gonna go for it.”

Third baseman Rafael Devers, now the face of the franchise, said last week the Red Sox needed to add pitching depth at the trade deadline. His rationale was simple: He believed the Sox could make a run if the pitching staff could be ratcheted up a little.

When that didn’t happen, an opportunity arrived for Red Sox players. They could resolve to play gripping, up-tempo, take-no-prisoners baseball. Old-timey tough-guy stuff. They could make it their mission to prove the front-office oddsmakers were wrong. They could do it for the fans by doing it for themselves.

Instead, Verdugo got benched by the manager before a key game against a team the Sox supposedly are battling for a wild-card berth.

Verdugo, speaking with reporters after the debacle, stumbled through a kinda-sorta yes when asked if he takes responsibility for not playing.

“Yeah, I mean, I guess it’s — like I said, it’s a manager’s decision, and I respect his decision,” he said. “He’s the jefe. He’s the one that … he’s our coach, man. He’s our coach. He’s the head guy here. So for me, yeah, I take responsibility. But at the end of the day, it’s his decision. And whether it hurt the team or helped the team today, we don’t know.”

What?

What?

That’s not taking responsibility. That’s throwing everything that happened right back into the face of his manager. And that’s a big problem. Good for Cora for standing up to Verdugo, who’s a fan favorite except he’s on a team whose manager doesn’t care which player’s shirts are flying off the rack at the souvenir store.

Remember, Cora no longer is the shiny new skipper who in 2018 guided the Red Sox to a World Series championship. His reputation took a hit when he was suspended for a season after MLB did a deep dive into the 2017 Houston Astros cheating scandal and Cora’s fingerprints showed up. He returned in 2021 and took the Sox to Game 6 of the ALCS. The Sox regressed last year, which is being kind. Now he’s trying to stitch together a playoff contender from a team with a few stars and a lot of black holes.

Cora has as much on the line as anyone. At some point, he needs to win again. In that spirit, it might have been easier had he simply looked the other way when, as MLB.com reported, Verdugo showed up late to Fenway Park on Saturday. But looking the other way might also have been a manager killer because the rest of the room would have seen what the manager chose not to.

Either way, we now know the Red Sox — that is, the Red Sox players — are not all in on this playoff business. Verdugo certainly isn’t.

Maybe we’ve been looking at this all wrong. We’ve been looking at odds. We’ve been looking at the offense, the defense, the pitching. We’ve been looking to see whether the likes of Chris Sale, Trevor Story and Garrett Whitlock will be liberated from the medic’s table in time to make impactful contributions.

We’ve been looking in all the wrong places.

Maybe what we really need to do is look into this team’s soul.