Roughly 20 percent of the baseball season has now been played, and the Red Sox have been a below-.500 team for every day of the 2011 campaign. Indeed, the team has gotten within one game of .500 just twice -- on Opening Day, and again after winning its third straight contest on Tuesday before just as quickly suffering three straight defeats -- en route to the current 14-18 record.

At this point, there is nothing deceiving about the Sox' record. While most would agree that it is not a reflection of the talent amassed on the roster, it is an accurate depiction of the team's play to date this year.

After a thorough 9-2 loss to the Twins on Friday (recap), in which the Sox endured a poor starting effort, made two errors that led to a pair of unearned runs, committed two balks and saw their manager ejected, the Red Sox have now been outscored on the season by 17 runs. They have had a below-average offense that has produced just 4.1 runs per game, a mark that ranks ninth in the American League. Their pitching staff, meanwhile, has allowed 4.6 runs per game, a mark that also ranks ninth in the AL.While the starters carried the Sox for an extended stretch -- producing a 2.33 ERA in 19 games prior to last night -- on the year, the rotation's 4.04 ERA is below-average in the American League, and ranks eighth among the 14 clubs. The bullpen, meanwhile, has a 5.14 ERA that occupies the 11th spot in the junior circuit.

In every phase of the game, this is a team that has been unimpressive in 2011. Even though, prior to their three-game losing streak, the Sox had reeled off a strong 12-5 stretch to reassert themselves after a 2-10 start, it has still been a team that has been unable to perform at a consistently high level.

That run, after all, was almost solely the byproduct of that dominant stretch of pitching. Even amidst that season-best stretch for the club, they still fell short of demonstrating the well-rounded, across-the-board talent that was supposed to characterize them.

"We just haven’t scored the runs when we need to, and haven’t pitched or played defense when we needed to," said third baseman Kevin Youkilis. "Last week, we were on top of the world, and this week we’re not on top of the world. We’re just going to have to keep riding that roller coaster I guess. It’s a long season. We’ve had a good stretch of winning games and now we’ve had a good stretch of losing. Now we’ve got to go back to the winning."

If there is a saving grace for the club, it is that none of its competitors has pulled away from the pack. There might have been years in the American League East when a team, at this stage of the season, would have been little more than a speck on the horizon, rendering thoughts of first place little more than a fantasy.

That is not the case this year. The Yankees have been quite good, forging an 18-12 record while playing at a .600 clip, but they have not enjoyed an out-of-body stretch to pull away from the pack. The second-place Rays are 18-14.

And so, the last-place Sox are five and four games behind their chief AL East competitors, while residing one game behind the third-place Blue Jays and a half-game afoul of the fourth-place Orioles. That relative standing is what has separated the Sox' poor start from being a disastrous one.

"I think we need to play a little better but you can’t look at our record technically. You just look at where we are in the standings in the East -- we’re only five games out and it’s May. It’s not like we’re 10 or 12 games out," said Sox starter Tim Wakefield, who took his lumps on Friday night, allowing eight runs (six earned) in 4 1/3 innings. "We’re still in the thick of things, even though we’re in last place. We’re still only five games out. There’s been a number of times we’ve been in July and been in second place five games out of first. I don’t think it’s an issue.

"I think we need to play better," he added. "Just, we need to fire on all cylinders but I wouldn’t push the panic button because technically we’re only five games out of first place. It’s not that far."

Though it now seems almost in the distant past, the Red Sox need not look far to know what they are capable of. It was, after all, this very week when the team marched through victories in games started by, in order, reigning AL Cy Young winner Felix Hernandez and Angels aces Jered Weaver and Dan Haren.

It was a terrifically impressive trio of games, which carried an intriguing undertone. Those were three straight victories of the sort of ilk that a team would need in order to succeed in the playoffs, tense games where runs were scarce and the Sox needed to execute well in different phases of the game -- whether by receiving excellent starting, timely hitting or quality defense -- in order to win.

They did just that, in what could be characterized as the team's most glimmering glimpse of its potential to date. But then the team backed that effort up by losing three straight games started by Ervin Santana, Joel Pineiro and Scott Baker -- fine pitchers all, but hardly luminaries. And the team committed lapses in different phases of the game, all at terrible times -- fielding gaffes, baserunning miscues, poorly located pitches, bad at-bats.

We’ve got to play better baseball overall, pay attention to detail," said first baseman Adrian Gonzalez. "We are going to be able to outslug and outplay teams just on talent alone, but these games that we’ve been losing, we’ve been losing because we haven’t been doing the little things in the game that count. It’s one of those things that we’ve got to do a better job of."

And so, the Sox now find themselves sitting in last place, confident that their record suggests but mindful that their sub-.500 standing is -- if not who they are -- then at the least what they have been.