Nick Pivetta to IL with a right elbow flexor strain

This season man.

Literally every pitcher in the league is getting injured, so you would need a crap load of depth to not have issues with pitcher injuries

Ok well they should have landed somewhere between “a crap load” and “only Criswell”

Was only a matter of time before pitch metric king Nick Pivetta had some elbow trouble IMO. Hope it's not too bad and he can come back looking great before his free agency.

Standard rule in Baseball, you can never have enough starting pitchers. Usually you want 7-8 guys. This isn’t bad luck, it happens to every team every single year except for a few lucky teams every now and then. It's a crazy long season, major depth is a huge part of the game. We basically had zero starting pitching depth to start the year.

They decided to add no depth to a thin rotation that already lost Giolito for the year. There was plenty of offseason left to add an arm once he went down and they simply chose not to. That’s what was “wrong”

They had the space for another name that lived a few minutes from the park (might have had to trade someone to squeeze him in). The two guys that got hurt were work horses, that's true, but I think the idea was to protect from any injury or two which every rotation will suffer and to push Whitlock and Houck down to the bullpen to improve that area in the interim.

The good news though is this has given us a chance to see Houck do his best 2000-Pedro impression.


I'm not sure I'm ready to trust Houck, Whitlock or Bello to eclipse (see what I did there?) 32 starts so the workhorses going down isn't a great start.

They could have had another starter or two and began with Houck and Whitlock in the pen and a couple of the pen guys in AAA so when injuries inevitably hit, the oh no you must start Houck and Whitlock crowd would still be appeased as they still wind up in the rotation but now with less quality depth behind them instead.

Too bad the Sox had no money for depth. Oh wait.

At some point you have to stop being such a front office sycophant. They do a lot of things very well (Breslow traded very well this offseason) but sometimes they dont which you can never seem to acknowledge. You just go into defense attorney mode.

I went into this season worried that Criswell would be in the rotation by May. Looks like my worst case scenario was overly optimistic.

I will say this about Whitlock and Houck. If people are dead set on letting them continue to get their cracks in the rotation then I'd rather they just start in the rotation rather than jerk them around. I've soured on them both in the rotation, but Houck more than Whitlock and so far this year Houck has been absolutely electric. I'm assuming he was the odd guy out before Giolito went down too.

That's not to say adding more depth wouldn't be possible.

The bolded is an aspect of this some people conveniently ignore when they act like the Red Sox had a ton of room to add more starters. This isn't a video game where you can just move guys around with no side effects, especially with pitching there is specific preparation that goes into whatever your role is going to be. It would obviously be nice to have another starter right now, even if it was one in the Clevinger tier, but those acting as if it's completely black and white that they could have signed another one if they simply wanted to are being pretty ignorant of some possible contextual factors. They very well may have tried, but I also wouldn't blame someone in that Clevinger tier if they felt they could secure a more defined role elsewhere (as Clevinger has seemingly done with a terrible White Sox rotation). 

The FO was in a tough spot. From the reporting it seems as if they were open to adding another guy, but weren't going to over-exert themselves to do so. It's easy to say in hindsight this didn't work out for them, but I think anyone arguing that it was unequivocally the right or wrong move is failing to argue in good faith (surprise, surprise...).

Im not being a damn sycophant... The amount of pitching injuries league wide should be sounding alarm bells at MLB HQ...


You have pitchers who were the traditional/reliable rubber arm/workhorse now getting season-ending injures... I cannot recall the last time there were this many injures and its only APRIL.. that's unmanageable for any team regardless of the amount of pitching depth one has