Red Sox’s Alex Cora Addressed Boston's Elephant In The Room

It was a rough night for the Boston Red Sox on Friday.

Boston welcomed the Atlanta Braves to town for a pitcher's duel involving Garrett Crochet of the Red Sox and old friend Chris Sale of the Braves. Unfortunately, the Red Sox were on the losing end of the clash to drop their record to 22-24 on the season so far. Boston is in second place in the American League East, but is five games behind the first place New York Yankees.

One aspect of the game on Friday that didn't go Boston's way was base running. The Red Sox have been aggressive on the base paths this year -- and has been successful in that respect -- but things didn't work out on Friday with three different base running mistakes.

After the game, Red Sox manager Alex Cora addressed the issues, as shared by MassLive.com's Christopher Smith.

"Alex Cora asked about the base running mistakes. Red Sox ran into three outs, all three ended innings:  'It’s frustrating. One thing, when you go through weeks like this, you don’t have to push the envelope. It’s the other way around. We have to slow it down as a team and I don’t think we need that today,'" Smith shared...

"Like I said, we have to slow down the game. We have to as a group. In these situations, when you’re not winning games — because we’re not playing bad — when you’re not winning games, it should be the other way around. Just let it happen. Sometimes that’s the best way of doing it. And today we pushed the envelope and it didn’t work out."

Luckily, there's still plenty of time left this season to turn things around, but the losses have piled up recently