The Boston Red Sox need improvement from their rotation, but reinforcements won’t be coming from Triple-A Pawtucket right now.
“We haven’t gotten into those conversations yet,” Red Sox general manager Ben Cherington told Jason Mastrodonato of The Boston Herald on Wednesday. “We haven’t had any formal dialogue with our Triple-A staff. We obviously see what they’re doing, we hear reports, but there hasn’t been any formal conversation for us to ask the question, ‘When is this guy ready? When is that guy ready?’
“As I’ve said before, my personal belief is once you’re in Triple-A you’re not a prospect anymore, you’re just part of our depth. Anybody there has to be ready to come up. We’ve played 21 games here, Pawtucket has played a couple less. We still have to get into the little season a little bit.”
Joe Kelly has the Boston rotation’s best earned run average at 4.94 through 23 2/3 innings entering Wednesday night’s game against the Toronto Blue Jays. As a team, the Red Sox had a 9.80 ERA with runners on base, 29th in the majors.
Going deep into games also has been a problem for Boston starters. Two of the last three games have featured a Red Sox starter failing to make it out of the third inning, putting an extra burden on the bullpen.
Even though the rotation hasn’t yet met expectations, it’s still a bit early to make a real evaluation when most of these pitchers haven’t even made five starts.
“To me, you’re probably into that six or eight starts, gives you somewhat of a snapshot of certainly where you’ve been, but maybe where you’re going,” Red Sox manager John Farrell said before Monday’s game versus Toronto. “Hopefully by that time you’re north of 40 innings, for a given starter if you’re in that eight-start period. That’s roughly 20 percent of the season, so it’s starting to give you a little bit of a gauge on where things are.”
Thumbnail photo via Twitter/BostonGlobe
