"We've been here before," Dustin Pedroia said. "We've got to come out and play better baseball.
"There's no excuses, obviously. They came out and kicked our butt tonight. It was 9-1, or whatever it ended up. They played great, we didn't. That was the bottom line of the game.
"There's no, 'Oh we should have done this.' No, none of that. It was a straight-up [butt] kicking, and we've got to play better."
Save for the bombs hit by the Rays, it was a quiet day at the park, a sedate crowd of 38,031 more in line with a Sunday day game in April than Game 3 of the American League Championship Series. And though the atmosphere was that way from the start, by the end of the third, there was cause to be subdued, and that was broken only rarely - including boos for the Captain on a popup in the fourth - as the Rays hit four home runs.
The loss left the Red Sox down, two games to one, in the series, as they lost the home-field advantage gained by winning a game over the weekend at Tropicana Field. It was due in part to a shaky Lester, who was touched in the third inning for a three-run blast by B.J. Upton over the Monster and onto the street and a follow-up solo shot by Evan Longoria.
"B.J. turned on a ball left over the plate," Lester said. "I hung a cutter to Longoria. You do stuff like that to good hitters, they're supposed to do what they did.
"At times I was effective with everything. I didn't execute, for the most part, two pitches, and they hurt me. With this team you can't have big innings like that."
That makes seven home runs off Red Sox pitching in the last two games.
But it was not entirely Lester. There were other factors, like the strikingly silent bats of Jacoby Ellsbury and David Ortiz and Jason Varitek. Neither the leadoff man, nor the designated hitter, nor the catcher have a hit in the ALCS.
