This is the formula for failure.

For years, the success of the Red Sox lineup was built on a philosophy of patience and plate discipline. Those have now gone out the window.

No starting pitcher in the majors entered Thursday night having walked more batters per nine innings than Ubaldo Jimenez. The Cleveland starter -- largely a flop in his year-plus since the Indians acquired him at last year’s trade deadline -- was issuing an average of 5.4 walks per nine innings. He’d walked four or more batters in 12 of his 22 starts -- most in the majors.

In past years, Jimenez would have represented an easy mark for the Sox, someone who might not make it out of the fifth inning against a lineup that took pride in its refusal to expand the strike zone, driving pitch counts north of 100 pitches to drive out a starter early and then loot and pillage against an opponent’s middle relievers.

On Thursday night, there seemed a chance that the Sox might channel that familiar pattern. Jacoby Ellsbury led off the game with a five-pitch walk, stole second and third . . . It had all the makings of an outing in which the Sox left Jimenez with his head spinning en route to an early departure.

It didn’t happen that way. Quite the contrary.

Jimenez didn’t walk another batter while striking out 10 in six innings. The Cleveland bullpen didn’t walk a batter in its three innings of work while striking out three, and the Indians took a 5-3 victory as the Sox kept burrowing like a prairie dog into an ever-deeper hole in the playoff race.

It would be a mistake to interpret too broadly the results of one game. After the contest, manager Bobby Valentine insisted to reporters that the Sox weren’t expanding the strike zone and chasing pitches. Rather, he suggested, it was home plate ump Tim Timmons who did that job for them.

“He's throwing the ball on the outside corner or wherever the heck it was, and he's getting every pitch called a strike. That's what I saw,” manager Bobby Valentine told reporters in Cleveland. “A lot of good pitches low and away. They're all strikes, just about, called strikes.

“I didn't think we were swinging real early. A lot of pitches were just called. Boom. That side of the plate was pretty generous today. Consistently so.”

Yet the idea that umpiring has consistently singled out the Sox for a strike zone expansion is, of course, far-fetched. And the issue is far broader for the Sox than Timmons’ strike zone on Thursday.

From 2003-11, the Red Sox never had a season where they had more than 30 games in which they walked one or fewer times. Indeed, five of those nine clubs had 20 or fewer games along those lines.

On Thursday, the Sox had their 31st game of 2012 with one or fewer walks. They are currently on pace to have 44 contests of one or no walks.

So what happened? In some cases, the replacements for injured players led to a considerably different offensive approach that undermined the philosophy of patience. In some cases, the team sacrificed patience for power in personnel decisions. And in other instances, players with track records of patience have altered their approaches this year.

The end result has been a very different lineup than the one that customarily dominated in the American League. Those looking for a culprit in the team’s boom-or-bust roller coaster can identify the removal of the team’s most consistent offensive weapon of recent years -- the team’s so-called philosophy of a “selective aggressive” approach at the plate.

The approach was best summarized once by Kevin Youkilis, who boiled down his strategy as an effort to “get a good pitch to hit and hit the crap out of it.”

Of course, Youkilis -- renowned for his refusal to chase pitches out of the strike zone and his ability to foul off tough pitches to drive up pitch counts -- is now gone, replaced by the incredibly talented but far more aggressive Will Middlebrooks. Marco Scutaro typically ranked near the top of the majors in terms of pitches per plate appearance. He’s gone, replaced by Mike Aviles, who tends to rank near the bottom of that category.

Meanwhile, Dustin Pedroia has seen his walk rate take a giant hit (from one every 8.5 at-bats last year to one every 14.0 at-bats this year), likely a reflection of some of the hand injuries that have limited his ability to manipulate the bat and that have altered his approach. And then there is Adrian Gonzalez, who has gone from walking in 17.5 percent of his plate appearances in 2009 to 13.4 percent in 2010 to 10.4 percent last year to a career-low 6.0 percent this year.

The net effect? An offense that has gone from 3.6 walks a game and 4.0 pitches per plate appearance last year to 2.8 walks per contest and 3.9 pitches per plate appearance this year.

It’s simply been a different sort of Red Sox lineup this year, and as a result, the team has been vulnerable to different sorts of pitchers than it might have been in the past. The same starters whom the team customarily turned into so much hamburger meat have no longer been put through the ringer.

In every season since 2004, the team had knocked out an opposing starter after no more than five innings on at least 57 occasions. This year, the team is on pace to accomplish that feat just 49 times, a considerable difference considering that teams typically win roughly three-quarters of games in which they knock out the opposing starter before he records an out in the sixth.

That said, there’s still plenty of muscle to flex in the Sox lineup, resulting in a number of eruptions (and contributing to the fact that the team still ranks second in the AL and third in the majors with 4.9 runs per game). But often, such contests will prove isolated and be followed quickly by a disappearing act, as with the Sox’ nine-run yield on Wednesday followed by the three-run effort on Thursday.

The formula that defined the Sox as an offensive juggernaut is no longer being employed. And the result has been a form of offensive vulnerability that hasn’t been on display for the club in years.