Mixing of the Sox this weekend comes at a crossroads point in a surprise season

It felt like the Red Sox had turned a corner over the summer, but now they need wins over baseball's worst time to help salvage the season.

Even before the five straight losses in Detroit and Queens, and the return to .500 months after they’d finally shed it, the Red Sox were trying to sell tickets for this weekend’s home series with the historically terrible White Sox thusly:

“A scary good time.”

It harkens back to the winter, when the prospect of selling anything around the team seemed a rough go, though the team’s marketing arm spun it as more different than difficult.

“We’re not going to talk [fans] out of something that they feel,” Adam Grossman, the Sox chief marketing officer, told the Globe in April. “What we are going to do is continue to do the things that we know are important in terms of marketing the players, in terms of putting them in a position where fans know them on the field and off the field and create Fenway Park as an attraction — and also know that sometimes in the end, those negative vibes do not always carry through on the field and to the end of the season.”

For months, the Red Sox shook those negative vibes. Playing well in spite of injuries tearing into an already thin roster. Playing well powered by pitching, the domain of the new pitching coach and the new baseball boss. Playing dynamic and exciting, powered by young players prone to still-learning mistakes, but imbued with the endless ceiling that hopium provides.

This weekend will remind us what bleak really is. Chicago comes to Boston 32-109 — no team you’ve ever seen has lost at that rate, unless you were around for the 1916 Philadelphia Athletics. Andrew Benintendi, now 30, is hitting .217/.280/.374 and has been one of the sport’s worst defensive outfielders this season. That shot of him flying through the air in the 2018 World Series feels like a million years ago.

Did I mention the $75 million the White Sox gave him before the 2023 season is the largest guaranteed contract they’ve ever given out? (The White Sox and A’s are the only two franchises to never sign a player to a nine-figure contract.)

That flying All-Star week for your Red Sox franchise — Roman Anthony in the skills challenge, Jarren Duran in the big game, Alex Cora talking up the division title — only feels about a millennia in the past, but still ancient.

What so recently felt like a corner turned is starting to feel like three of them, right back to where we started. The 2022 Red Sox went 8-19 in July, going from the third-best record in the American League to 78-84 by year’s end. The 2023 Red Sox went 8-19 in September, lingering longer in the playoff race, but ultimately folding back to six below .500.

The 2024 Red Sox need to go 8-14 to make it three in a row, 12-10 to top .500, and their best stuff in a generation to humor a playoff challenge. (They won 20 of 22 in the latter half of August 2004.)

Perhaps even in context that’s an irrelevant point. The Sox are closer to last-in-the-East Blue Jays (3.5 games) than they are to a playoff spot (5.5).

“Right now, we’re just an average team,” Alex Cora told reporters on Wednesday. “We’ve got to show up on Friday and be better.”

Whether they do or don’t somehow feels unrelated to how we’ll view them into the winter and beyond. The crash back to baseball’s forgettable middle has put ownership back in the spotlight. The tenor around the team has gone back to, “there was more here, but.”

Nothing short of a World Series was ever going to change that, frankly. Nor should it have.

The perpetual hanging question over the Red Sox during this era where they’re a jewel in its bosses’ crown, as opposed to the one on the tippity top, is what happens when the young core establishes and arrives. Never mind full throttle . . . when does the shift to second and third gear happen?

This was a year for Craig Breslow and Co. to take stock, and he’s learned plenty. He has establishing outfielders — Ceddanne Rafaela, Jarren Duran, and Wilyer Abreu, with Anthony knocking on the door. He still needs a second baseman. (Maybe Kristian Campbell, if you’re out on wishcasting Vaughn Grissom.) Catcher is ready for Kyle Teel when he is.

And the rotation has a ton of supporting pieces. The one locked in for the rest of the 2020s, Brayan Bello, is still only showing top-end signs. The only healthy one not years from free agency, Nick Pivetta, is who he is. Lucas Giolito is signed for another year with a mutual 2026 option, giving him a second chance to be the “is who he is” arm that he was. The rest have 3-4 years to prove themselves as something more.

Not that they’ve been the problem: Beginning with the Houston sweep on Aug. 9, Red Sox starters have averaged five innings a night with a 3.61 ERA, good for the seventh-best mark in that span. The bullpen ERA in that span is 6.77, worst by nearly a run. The offensive fWAR is 28th of 30 teams, averaging 3.8 runs/game.

We’ve seen it three years running, though. At some point, these underbuilt rosters run out of pitching before they even get to the deeper scrutiny of postseason baseball. Without question, getting more than 18 innings from Giolito and Garrett Whitlock might’ve made life easier on everyone.

Again, three years running. James Paxton was 2022’s Giolito, a fingers-crossed addition for the stretch run that never came. Corey Kluber made nine rough starts in 2023 before he decamped for the injured list, but he was another attempt at reinforcing the foundation while, fingers crossed, some real support beams materialized inside.

Breslow can’t be faulted for the moves of his predecessor, but others can. At some point, the roster has to have proven itself worthy of something more than fringe pieces and a supporting cast.

One would hope.

A century ago, those 1916 Philadelphia Athletics were three years removed from winning three World Series, selling off stars they could no longer afford, in promise of a younger, brighter future. (A reminder: There are no new ideas.) Difference was in that time, real winning was required, with little more than concessions and tickets paying.

Today’s different, and there’s no denying even after three mediocre-at-best years, the Red Sox product remains captivating. Fenway Park remains a draw. Salesmanship works, and hope feels close at hand when young players are becoming the ones filling T-shirt jerseys and commercial time.

This weekend at Fenway. I suspect more scary than good, but I’ve been surprised before.

And we tend to remember those times a lot easier than the ones when we aren’t.