BOSTON -- When Mookie Betts made his postseason debut last month, he did something in his very first at-bat that he hadn’t done in his final 78 regular-season plate appearances.

He struck out.

Baseball’s version of a solar eclipse occurred Oct. 6, in the first inning of Game 1 of the Boston Red Sox’s ill-fated Division Series against the Cleveland Indians. Betts swung through back-to-back-to-back fastballs from Indians starter Trevor Bauer, only the 15th time in 731 plate appearances that he whiffed on three successive pitches.

Red Sox manager John Farrell reasonably chalked it up to nerves. And Betts wasn’t the only Red Sox player to come down with a case of good, old-fashioned playoff jitters. Fellow postseason first-timer Jackie Bradley Jr., a center fielder known for his booming arm with bull’s-eye accuracy, pulled two home-plate-bound throws up the first-base line.

“First game of the postseason there’s a little anxiety,” Farrell said. “And you combine it with an 8 o’clock start, which, even when we have an 8 o’clock start on a Sunday during the regular season, there’s a different feel to it. The fact that we had three days down [after the regular season], five guys in our lineup being their first postseason, yeah, there were some things that were firsts.”

It didn’t get appreciably better over the next two games. Before Bradley singled in the ninth inning of Game 3, he was 0-for-9 with seven strikeouts. Betts finished 2-for-10 with one extra-base hit. Shortstop Xander Bogaerts, along for the ride when Boston won the World Series in 2013 but still at an impressionable stage of his career, was 1-for-8 with four strikeouts before going 2-for-4 in Game 3.

Center fielder Jackie Bradley Jr. got his first taste of the postseason, going 1-for-10 with seven strikeouts during the Division Series. Frank Jansky/Icon Sportswire

The Red Sox, widely regarded as the favorite to win the AL pennant when the playoffs began, got swept.

Out of that disappointment comes hope. Consider what happened against the Indians to be a learning experience for a Red Sox team that leaned heavily on 40-year-old franchise icon David Ortiz in his farewell season but was defined by its youth. Betts and Bogaerts turned 24 last month; Bradley is 26; left fielder Andrew Benintendi, who homered in his first playoff at-bat, is 22; the farm system is loaded with prospects, including 21-year-old infielder Yoan Moncada.

It’s no wonder president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski is focused on making changes on the margins this winter while believing the Red Sox’s core is best left intact and will only benefit from having gone through this past season together.

“Now we know what to expect [in the postseason],” Betts said. "It's going to be really important for the years going forward. We’ll know what to expect and how to handle adversity and how to go about the games and whatnot. It’s going to be definitely a positive.”

Said Bogaerts: “It was a great experience. A lot of pressure, but we have to learn how to control it, how to think in that moment. Just not overthinking a lot of stuff, trying to be in the moment and being focused.”

The Red Sox wouldn't be the first team to learn how to win by losing.

Last year, the Chicago Cubs were humbled in a National League Championship Series sweep against the New York Mets in which young sluggers Kris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo, Javier Baez and Kyle Schwarber combined to go 9-for-52 with 16 strikeouts. And Red Sox fans need not be reminded of the Aaron (Bleeping) Boone gut punch in 2003 that preceded the Curse-busting World Series exhilaration a year later.

But the comparison the Red Sox hope to follow is the Philadelphia Phillies’ recent run. Like the Sox, those Phillies were built around a strong core of position players. In 2007, in their first exposure to the playoffs, Ryan Howard, Chase Utley, Jimmy Rollins and Shane Victorino went 9-for-43 with 16 strikeouts while getting swept in the NLDS by the Colorado Rockies.

A year later, they played starring roles in a World Series championship.

“I think it was very important for us to go through that,” Victorino said by phone. “It was a wake-up call. We went on that miraculous run to win the division, and we ran into a team that was that much better and that much hotter. It was definitely a stepping-stone for the next year.”

Red Sox first base coach Ruben Amaro Jr. was the Phillies’ assistant general manager in 2007 and recalls the coaching staff preparing the players for their first postseason by trying to duplicate the atmosphere of the regular season, especially late September, when they were pushing to win the division title. Farrell and his coaches attempted to do the same with the youngest Red Sox players before the Division Series opened in Cleveland.

“But when you get right down to it, when you get into the experience of being in the playoffs, there’s really nothing like it,” Amaro said by phone. “The heart rates are going to be faster. Your thought process and the way you go about your business, your routines, they’re going to be pretty well elevated. Our players, I’m not sure if they were particularly overwhelmed, but certainly it’s a different experience.

“As far as Jackie and Mookie are concerned, listen, they’re aggressive players. They play with confidence. Were they a little more heightened as far as their emotion was concerned? I hope so because they’d be inhuman if they weren’t. It’s just a matter of going through the process and getting used to it.”

Victorino played for the Red Sox from 2013 to '15, during which time Bogaerts, Bradley and Betts broke into the big leagues. In particular, he is a big Betts backer, having presciently compared him in 2014 to Pittsburgh Pirates star center fielder Andrew McCutchen.

Like most observers, Victorino is bullish on Boston’s chances of returning to the postseason next year. As much as he wants to see the Red Sox learn from their failure against the Indians, however, he cautioned against the notion that they will automatically be better for having gone through a playoff series.

“The team that we had [in Philadelphia], the individuals that we had, we learned from that defeat and we made ourselves better,” Victorino said. “The same guys came back in 2008 with the same fire, the same desire, the same master plan to go and win the World Series. Now, fast-forward to the Red Sox. Yes, it was their first real experience with the postseason. But it’s how do you take that and implement it into the next year. Are they going to buy into it and turn it into greatness?”

Amaro referred to the "quiet confidence" that the holdovers from the 2007 Phillies took into 2008. With Betts, Bradley and Bogaerts stepping more squarely into leadership roles with the post-Ortiz Red Sox, he believes they will exhibit the same attitude he saw from those Phillies.

“I think those guys just seriously believed they could do this and have success,” Amaro said. "They went into [2008] with a little bit more confidence and obviously more experience, and that certainly helped. With our guys, I fully expect in the future, if they get those [postseason] opportunities again, and hopefully they will, they will go out there and take care of business.”

Then the Red Sox will have won from losing.