Red Sox Road Trip Presents Potential Pitfalls, As Well As Opportunity to Break Out of Slump

The Red Sox clubhouse was an absolute mess Wednesday afternoon. That's rather customary on a getaway day, as 25 players, a coaching staff and all of the team's equipment has to be shuttled to buses and trucks and then placed on a plane, all within less than one hour after the last out of a tough-to-stomach loss.

The minds of those 25 players might have been just as helter skelter, for they were trying to make sense of a sudden loss of offense, not to mention a rather daunting trip that laid ahead of them.

And to be clear, both legs of the journey present pitfalls, despite the disparity in quality of the opponents.

Four games in Kansas City is no easy task. The Sox are 9-10 in Kauffman Stadium since 2005. Included in that is the three-game set there last April that saw Jacoby Ellsbury effectively lose his season in a collision with Adrian Beltre.

Also, the young, talented Royals gave Boston a small taste of the potential that has many observers in Kansas City excited for the future when it split a four-game set in Fenway Park last month. An impression was made.

"Kansas City played us tough here," Dustin Pedroia said. "They've got a great bullpen, great bunch of young hitters, they swing the bats great. Gotta go in there and play well."

Billy Butler was 9-for-19 with three home runs and eight RBIs in that series. Eric Hosmer was 8-for-19 with a homer and five runs batted in, and Melky Cabrera had six hits in his 16 at-bats.

The Royals entered play Wednesday ranked fifth in the American League in batting, third in doubles and tied for first in stolen bases. This is a lineup that can hurt you.

But not quite as much as the Rangers, who will host the Sox for four games next week in a place that has seen Boston go 2-10 since 2009. Your thoughts, Dustin?

"Yeah, Texas. They whooped on us early, so we know what type of team they have," Pedroia said. "They pitch well, they swing the bats great, so it's gonna be tough. We're going to have to play better."

Essentially, that's what it comes down to. The Red Sox have to do more than they've done over the past week or so, a stretch in which their bats have cooled as their bumps and bruises have only increased.

It's been enough to throw the team, just weeks removed from a historic run of dominance, for a bit of a loop.

One glance at a haywire clubhouse on Wednesday said as much. It's now up to the Red Sox to clean up this mess.