After a weekend on which they pounded out clutch hits one after another, Red Sox hitters generally went quietly into the night in a 7-3 loss to the Toronto Blue Jays.

It was, in other words, an all-too-familiar night's work for Tim Wakefield.

The lack of run support last season for the veteran knuckleballer was well documented: In his 11 losses, he was backed with just six runs - an average (0.54 runs) that meant Wakefield had to be well nigh perfect to have a chance to win.

Wakefield has pitched extremely well this season, and wasn't bad last night - scattering eight hits in six innings and yielding four runs (three earned), while walking two and fanning five. He served up 100 pitches, and 75 were strikes. Yet he slipped to 2-2, and saw what had been an American League-leading 1.35 ERA jump to 2.08.

Still, he again pitched well enough to win if the Sox bats had been a bit more lively.

"I thought his ball was moving well,'' Sox skipper Terry Francona said. "You go on the scoreboard and we weren't doing a lot of damage.''

But Wakefield took the rap for his mates, talking chiefly about the 0-1 knuckler that was crushed a long, long way to left-center by Toronto slugger Frank Thomas - a two-run homer that gave the Jays a 3-2 edge in the sixth, a lead they never lost.

"I felt I pitched pretty good until the sixth,'' Wakefield said. "A leadoff walk (to center fielder Vernon Wells) shouldn't have happened. And then with Vernon's speed at first, I tried to be a little bit too fast (in his delivery to the plate). I tried to give (Sox catcher) Dougie (Mirabelli) a chance to maybe throw him out if he ran. I just left a ball up.

"I can do that. I just came out of my mechanics. Unfortunately, you make a mistake like that to a guy who's got 490 home runs and he'll hurt you most of the time. It was a mistake on my part that cost us the game.

"That was probably the turning point of the game, unfortunately,'' Wakefield added. "I made a mistake there and I made a mistake to (Jason) Phillips (on an RBI single later in the sixth). I was ahead in the count against him, but I left a ball up and he was able to get one in for a hit and score their fourth run.''

Of course, four runs against should not have been too much to overcome for a Red Sox club that had put up seven runs in each of the three wins vs. the Yankees. But on a night when the Sox box score was filled with groundouts and pop-ups, it was.

The atmosphere around Fenway last night bore little resemblance to the electric feel of the weekend games. But Wakefield did not sense any emotional slip among his mates after the highs of the previous three days.

"I don't think so,'' he said. "We're all professionals in there. We knew we were facing a good team coming in for the short two-game series. I didn't feel like there was an emotional letdown for us.''

Whether there was a letdown with the bats, that's another story - one that's very familiar for Wakefield.