TORONTO -- During a long conversation Wednesday afternoon, Rangers manager Jeff Banister was explaining that losses in baseball rarely bubble up from one key moment. Everything, he said, is interconnected. One action leads to a chain of other reactions down the line. Everything is somehow related to everything else.

It's kind of like ancestry.com.

Before we trace the roots of the club's second straight walkoff loss, 4-3 to Toronto, we should say it's the fifth walkoff loss in 13 road games this season. In 2015, the Rangers had six. For the year.

"I don't look at those numbers," Banister said when asked if the frequency of early walkoff losses could take a toll on the team. "I'm not going to get affected by that number. When you are on the road, you've got to put runs on the board when you've got a chance and you've got to be able to close out close games."

Now, about the genealogy of Wednesday's loss: It can be traced to a walk.

Not the one that Colby Lewis allowed to Jose Bautista just ahead of Edwin Encarnacion's two-out, game-tying homer in the sixth Wednesday. And not the two that Tony Barnette allowed in the ninth that moved the winning run to third base, from which it easily scored on Russell Martin's long opposite-field single.

No, the walk in question came in the fifth inning. Tuesday.

That was the six-pitch, two-out walk by Martin Perez while holding a 1-0 lead. It led to another nine-pitch at-bat, which brought his pitch total to 28 for the inning and 90 for the night. It forced the bullpen into the game early, and combined with some command issues, made the relief corps work harder. And then it all went kablooey anyway in the ninth and 10th, when Shawn Tolleson and Phil Klein allowed homers to tie and lose the game.

And so when Wednesday's game began, the Rangers were already short-handed. They were without Jake Diekman, who had thrown 29 pitches Tuesday, Sam Dyson, who pitched for the third straight day, and Tolleson, who threw 31 pitches Tuesday.

Unless Lewis threw a complete game or the offense went on a rampage (it did not and has not done so on the road this season), some inexperienced members of the bullpen were going to have to get involved. That Lewis went seven innings and handed off a tie game to the bullpen, even despite allowing the two-out, game-tying homer to Encarnacion, only marginally improved the Rangers' win probability.

According to fangraphs.com's win-expectancy graph, the Rangers' chances dipped to 49.3 percent once the game was tied and then to 40.4 percent by the time Tom Wilhelmsen took the mound in the bottom of the eighth.

"I felt good about all the guys we sent out there," said Banister, who got a perfect inning from Wilhelmsen, only his second of the season. "There are opportunities and times when you are going to have games like this when there are guys down in the bullpen and you are limited in what you have. But they are major league pitchers and they are quality, and we trust what they do for us. We'll learn from it; try to eliminate the walks late and continue to pound away."

Here, Banister found another connection: The inability of the offense to sustain innings. The Rangers scored in each of the first two innings and forced Aaron Sanchez to throw 36 pitches (18 per inning) in the process. He averaged just 13 an inning for the next five to get Toronto through seven.

The Rangers have scored three or fewer runs in each of their last seven road games and are 1-6, the one win being a 2-1 victory in Monday's series opener. The Rangers have averaged fewer than 16 pitches per inning against opposing starters in the seven-game stretch. And then the offense dries up further. Actually, the late wilting of the offense has been evident everywhere. The Rangers have been outscored 34-10 from the eighth inning on, including 10-3 in the last seven road games.

"We've got to find a way to put some more runs on the board also," Banister said. "We've gotten some runs early, but we've got to be able to sustain some of those innings and continue to put some runs across the board, however it may be. We've got to dig deep and find a little resilience tomorrow."

Otherwise, they may be facing a third consecutive loss that is connected to the two that came before it.