The season-opening road trip for the Boston Red Sox could not have gone much worse.

After a solid win on Opening Day, the Red Sox dropped five in a row, including a sweep by the Houston Astros with a 6-4 loss on Wednesday. The Red Sox head home to Fenway Park on Friday with a 1-5 record, their worst start to the season since 2019.

The offense is struggling, the pitching is scuffling and the defense looks sloppy. Yes, these are small samples, but if the club were playing well, we’d be pointing out all the good first impressions in just the same way.

Their early-season play isn’t necessarily an indication of how the season will play out, but after questions swirled all spring on whether the Red Sox added enough this offseason, the early returns have been disappointing.

Even on Wednesday, ace Garrett Crochet couldn’t stop the bleeding, allowing five runs, four earned, on six hits, including a three-run homer shortly after the Red Sox had tied the game.

“It’s embarrassing,” Crochet told reporters after the game about his start.

“It doesn’t matter whether it’s early or not; at some point, we have to make our own breaks.”

Some takeaways from a rough trip as the Red Sox head into Thursday’s much-needed off day:

A sluggish offense

The offense has not been good through the first six games, scoring just 17 runs and striking out 73 times, putting them in the bottom five in the league in both categories.

Even when the Red Sox battled a bit on Wednesday, including an early 1-0 lead and coming back to tie the score at 2-2 the next inning, Crochet couldn’t hold it.

Manager Alex Cora had Jarren Duran lead off in Roman Anthony’s place, which initially provided a spark. Duran reached on a single and scored on a Willson Contreras RBI single. After the Astros went ahead 2-1, Duran drove in a run on a groundout in the second to tie it. But the Red Sox still left seven men on base and went 1-for-7 with runners in scoring position, rendering moot two solo homers later in the game.

Trevor Story and Masataka Yoshida were 0-for-8 in the two- and three-holes, and Caleb Durbin is still searching for his first hit of the year.

Anthony had recorded just one hit in his last 17 at-bats entering Wednesday. He’d racked up 10 strikeouts in that stretch, including four in Tuesday’s loss, three of which came on the minimum of nine pitches. But when he entered as a pinch-hitter in the ninth on Wednesday, he clubbed his first homer of the year, offering a sign he might be breaking out of the early-season slump.

The only consistent bright spot offensively continues to be Wilyer Abreu, whose eighth-inning homer pulled the Red Sox within 6-3. He now has three homers and six RBIs, while the rest of the Red Sox offense has combined for three homers and 10 RBIs.

Perhaps the offense will find its rhythm once it returns home to hitter-friendly Fenway, where the team posted the fourth-best average last season at home (.262) while tallying the most doubles (177) thanks to the wall.

Poor pitching

Crochet’s uneven performance continued a trend of poor starts from the rotation.

The Astros tagged Ranger Suarez for four runs in 4 1/3 innings on Monday, with Johan Oviedo following him to the mound and allowing four more runs in 3 2/3 innings. Even more troubling was that Oviedo had little explanation for why his four-seam velocity dipped from an average of 95 mph to 93 mph. Brayan Bello, who had a strong spring, gave up six runs, five earned, in four innings on Tuesday. He walked three, all on two outs, and struck out just two batters.

Outside of Crochet’s start in the season-opener and Connelly Early’s start on Sunday in Cincinnati, the rotation, which was supposed to be a strength of the team, has left a lot to be desired through the first week.

Red Sox starters have a 5.22 ERA and have allowed five homers, tied for the most allowed in the American League.

Sonny Gray, who struggled on Saturday in Cincinnati, is on the mound in the home opener on Friday.

Questions for Cora

On Wednesday, Cora benched catcher Carlos Narváez before the game but did not give a reason for doing so, telling reporters in Houston, “He (Narváez) understands, and it’s something that happens in every club. It just happens to be early in the season, and I think it’s the right thing to do.”

Narváez told reporters the benching was not for an injury or physical reason. With little other explanation, it seems to be a disciplinary action, on which neither party wanted to elaborate.

Narváez caught Crochet in the opener and was behind the plate for 27 of Crochet’s 32 starts last season as his de facto starting catcher.

Over the weekend, Cora said he planned to have Connor Wong start Tuesday night’s game because Narváez was set to start Wednesday’s day game. The last-minute change, so far, remains unexplained. A team source called it, “just AC’s decision.”

Meanwhile, the unexplained benching of Narváez came a day after Cora admitted a lack of awareness during Tuesday’s game when Bello should have had a strikeout to end the fifth, but home plate umpire Mark Wegner mixed up the count, and no one caught it. Cora took full blame for missing the call.

The benching of Narváez and the lack of in-game awareness are troublesome signs six games into the season.

A few more notes

Cora told reporters that Patrick Sandoval would begin a rehab assignment for Double-A Portland on Sunday, while Kutter Crawford is having a scheduled deload week and is expected to start a rehab assignment the following week.

Triston Casas, who’s remained in Fort Myers, Fla., while rehabbing from knee surgery, had a setback with a strained left intercostal, a muscle that connects the oblique and ribcage. Because of that, he’s been shut down from swinging. Cora did not know when Casas would resume swinging.