RED SOX ROTATION REBUILD
Red Sox rotation has notable exceptions with Sale, Price, Rodríguez all out of it
Chris Sale is recovering from elbow surgery. David Price was traded. Rick Porcello left as a free agent. Eduardo Rodríguez tested positive for COVID-19.
The Boston Red Sox are scrambling to put their starting rotation back together for the 60-game baseball season, and it won’t look like the one fans might have expected at the end of last year — or even the start of spring training in February.
“Our loss of a couple guys, it makes a big difference,” manager Ron Roenicke said. “Eddie, we know will be back, (it’s) just a question of when. But anytime you lose that many starting pitchers, it’s hard to replace those guys.”
Chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom, who had success using an opener in Tampa Bay, had already been open-minded about using a reliever to start — even before trading Price and losing Sale to Tommy John surgery this spring.
But now it will be a virtual necessity.
The Red Sox can hope the
shortened season and training camp — along with the possibility that a positive COVID-19 test takes a star player out of the lineup — will put less of an emphasis on having a set rotation.
Or, maybe it will become even more important. “I think the game is humbling enough that we should be careful to think we can know too much,” Bloom told reporters last month. “There are going to be some other things that are different. Given that we haven’t done this before — especially under these circumstances — I don’t think we really know.”