BOSTON — Let's make this simple.

The Tampa Bay Rays are just better. Way, way better.

Two straight games had gone badly for the defending world champions. Terry Francona's Plan B to stop the Rays surge tonight was throw a 42-year-old knuckleballer in Game 4, juggle the Red Sox lineup and hope for the best.

Just out of curiosity, what's Plan C?

The Red Sox might be running out of ideas and they are certainly running out of time. Meanwhile, the rest of us are running out of ways to explain what is happening in the American League, except for the most straightforward reason of all.

One team is vastly superior to the other. Pay no attention to pedigree. That stopped meaning anything some time ago.

It is 3-1 now for Tampa Bay in the series after this latest 13-4 thrashing, and the champagne is on ice. There is not the slightest hint in sight that Boston can turn it around. What the Red Sox face now — after being pummeled 22-5 in two nights in their own ballpark — is not only elimination but embarrassment.

And they'll get two days to marinate in the distress from Tampa Bay's campaign of shock and awe, since Game 5 isn't until Thursday night. The only thing that can slow down the Rays these days is baseball's silly television schedule.

By the time three more Tampa Bay missile shots left the Fenway Park zip code Tuesday night, the score was 5-0 in the third inning. By the end of the sixth inning, it was 11-1.

It didn't take long for Fenway Park to settle into the noise level of your public library. But you should have heard the sound effects from the 2·unfortunate innings of Tim Wakefield.

WHACK! That was Carlos Pena's two-run homer in the first inning.

CRACK! That was Evan Longoria's solo shot two pitches later.

BOOM! That was Willy Aybar's two-run bomb over the left field wall and into the night in the third inning.

By then, it was hard to decide if this was more like Josh Hamilton's home run derby at the All-Star Game, or a recreational softball league.

What we do know is that it gave the Rays 10 home runs against Boston pitching in 23 postseason innings.

The only thing that can reassure the Red Sox at the moment is history — and memories from coming 3-0 behind to take down the Yankees in 2004 and rally from 3-1 last year against Cleveland.

"I like the way we are right now," manager Joe Maddon said before the game of the attitude he sensed in the Tampa Bay clubhouse.

Each night now, you look for a new example of what the Rays have become.

It need not be a show of muscle, though that has been positively ferocious. Francona sent out Josh Beckett, Jon Lester and Wakefield — World Series veterans all — to start the past three games, and seen them blown away for 18 runs in 12·innings, giving up eight homers.

But there have been other moments that did not involve everyone wondering where a ball was going to land.

One was in the second inning Tuesday, after Longoria made a double error on Jason Bay's broken-bat grounder, and Mark Kotsay followed with a single. Those were the Rays' first errors of the postseason, by the way, which sends its own message.

Two on, one out. This seemed a true Boston rally, and it was still a game. Tampa Bay led only 3-0. But pitcher Andy Sonnanstine got a ground ball from Coco Crisp, which second baseman Akinori Iwamura quickly scooped to start a double play. Inning over.

It was the kind of play a confident team makes when it understands where it is going.

"I think you can ask every one of our guys," Maddon said. "We believe we can do this all the way."

In stunned New England, they're beginning to get that idea, too.