BALTIMORE -- This wasn’t the Red Sox throwing up their hands as they did on the last day of August four years ago, when they traded David Wells to the San Diego Padres.

Just think back to last weekend in Tropicana Field, when Manny Delcarmen was bypassed by manager Terry Francona for Scott Atchison in a game vital to the Sox chances of climbing back in the race.

The waiver deal that sent Delcarmen to the Colorado Rockies on Tuesday for a 21-year-old minor-league reliever, Chris Balcom-Miller, was an opportunity, general manager Theo Epstein said, to pick up a promising prospect for a piece that had ceased to be an important part of the Red Sox puzzle.

Barring any last-minute developments, Epstein said, it was probably the only move the Sox would make before Tuesday night’s midnight waiver deadline. But with the Sox starting the night seven games down in the loss column to both the Yankees and Rays for a postseason spot with just over a month to go, that should not be interpreted as a white-flag moment, he said.

“It’ll be difficult but not impossible,’’ Epstein said of overcoming the teams ahead of them. “I’m not going to sit here and assess how difficult that will be. I’ll leave that up to you guys [reporters], but we need to play better and get hotter than we’ve been at any point in the season.

“This is not the position we want to be in. As Tito said, we had a good opportunity in a big series over the weekend with three games that we had a chance to win, and only won one of them.

“That doesn’t make things easier, but it’s not impossible. I’m not going to sit here and blow smoke and say we’re right where we want to be. We’ve got to get extremely hot and catch some breaks along the way. That’s why we’re here, trying to win these games and make that happen.

“It’s not that that is a likelihood or that we’re in a perfect position to do that. We’re not.’’

Epstein said that while the next month will give the club a chance to evaluate some young players, like Jarrod Saltalamacchia, that remains a secondary priority for the time being.

“The priority now is still to try and catch lightning in a bottle, get as hot as we need to get to get back in this thing,’’ he said. “You don’t give up while you have that opportunity. It’s not all about the math… If we’re not able to accomplish that and we reach a point where we’re no longer playing for this year, we’re eliminated, then obviously we take a look at some pieces for the future.

“You can tell by the lineups Tito’s writing out that we’re trying to win today, tomorrow, the day after that and make this interesting. Just because we let some opportunities slip away and some things have gone against us this year doesn’t mean it’s over. We have to try to make this thing interesting.’’

At what point do the Sox give up on this season?

“That’s a tough question,’’ he said. “It’s kind of like what the Supreme Court said about pornography: You know it when you see it. Right now we’re not eliminated. We could get really hot.’’

While acknowledging the impact that injuries have had on the club, Epstein did not ascribe the full weight of the team’s performance to the number of players on the disabled list.

“Injuries are part of the game,’’ he said. “I think we are where we are partly because of injuries, but that’s not the whole reason, either. We’ve had opportunities that we let get away. That’s not placing blame on anyone, that’s just the reality. To sit back and say what might have been if we’d stayed healthy or had normal health, there’s a ton of talent on this roster. Maybe we’d be in a different position, but we’re not.

“We have to play the hand that we’re dealt. As I said, we’re not in the position we want to be in right now, so we’ve got to go out and try to find a way to get extremely hot and overcome these odds.’’

Epstein was asked specifically to assess the starting rotation, projected to be the strength of the team coming into the season.

“I think it’s fair to say we expected the rotation, 1 to 5, to be a real weapon for us,’’ he said. “If everything broke our way, it might be really dominant, and there was even some margin for error built in if one guy didn’t perform. We had the horses to pick up the slack and it hasn’t come to fruition exactly the way we imagined.

“Guys are still battling, and certainly there have been some guys who have taken a major step forward, Clay Buchholz first and foremost. It hasn’t all come together the way we’d like, [but] that’s baseball. I wish things were more predictable. You try to put the pieces in place and hope it plays out a certain way, but it doesn’t always work that way.

“There’s still time to right the ship and string together quality start after quality start and figure things out for the future as well. I think we certainly have the talent. It’s as talented a starting rotation as any team in baseball. It’s just been one of those years we haven’t had the consistency, the consistent domination of 1 to 5 that we had the potential [of having].’’