Red Sox bats slumping on the road

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If the Boston Red Sox have any designs on winning on the road this season, maybe they should first concentrate on hitting on the road. Either way, they haven't been doing much of either of late. Their 1-0 loss Wednesday night in Seattle left them 1-5 through the first two stops of this three-city road trip. Two of the five losses have come in shutouts. In those two games, the Sox combined for only three hits. In the six road games in the last week, the Sox are hitting a not-so-robust .169. They've scored only 14 runs in those six games for an average of 2.2 runs, less than half of their season average of 4.98 per game. "It's a combination of things," said Dustin Pedroia when asked to explain the team's offensive dip. "The strike zone's been a little bigger and some pitchers have been throwing the ball well. I don't know -- we weren't in two good hitters' parks (Oakland and Seattle). Just one of those things, I guess."Manager Terry Francona, too, cited some of the pitchers the Sox have seen to date, including Oakland's Rich Harden and Seattle's Erik Bedard and Felix Hernandez, as one of the reasons for the team's collective cooling off at the plate. "They've been pounding the strike zone and working ahead," he said of the opponents. "They've done a good job against us." Boston still leads the American League in batting at .282 and is second with 279 runs scored and third with 58 home runs.In the meantime, the Red Sox are a game behind the front-running Tampa Bay Rays, heading into a four-game series starting Friday night in Baltimore, where Boston lost a pair of games to the Orioles at Camden Yards just two weeks ago. (Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)