An ace pushed back, on purpose
Boston will send someone to the mound against Seattle on Tuesday night. Nobody outside the clubhouse knows who yet. What the Red Sox did confirm on Monday is who it will not be.
Sonny Gray, 16-4 with a 2.82 ERA, was originally pencilled in for the start. He has been pushed back to Saturday in Baltimore instead, for no reason more dramatic than accumulated fatigue.
“I feel fine,” Gray said. “I think it’s just (a matter) of taking a few days, getting my body recovered, fully recovered, and that was it.” He added that the conversation had been sitting on the calendar for about a month, and that he was not too proud to admit he needed the days.
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What 16-4 buys you in September
Interim manager Chad Tracy framed the decision as scheduled maintenance rather than a warning sign. “We all knew there was probably going to be a time when we needed to give him a little bit of a breather,” he said. “To get him some rest with his body and make sure that he’s full go when we get down the stretch.”
The arithmetic supports him. Boston sit at 75-63 with the final month of the regular season opening, and a 2.82 ERA from a pitcher carrying a .800 winning percentage is the sort of asset a contender protects rather than spends in the first week of September. Tuesday can become a bullpen game, or the Red Sox can call up an arm from Triple-A Worcester. Tracy would only say there are a lot of possibilities.
Seattle arrive with a problem of their own
Bryan Woo (9-9, 4.36 ERA) takes the ball for the Mariners, who are 64-74 and have now lost five in a row. Woo has faced Boston twice in his career, started and won both, and conceded almost nothing along the way: a 1.38 ERA across the pair.
Monday showed how thin Seattle’s margin has become. They lost 9-8 in ten innings after Julio Rodriguez went for a Roman Anthony line drive in the ninth, could not reach it, and turned a probable out into a triple. The run scored. The game went to extras.
“My instincts told me to go for it,” Rodriguez told The Seattle Times. “Couldn’t get it. Unfortunately, that ended up costing a run for us.”
Trevor Story then singled home the winner in the tenth, having already doubled in two the inning before. That is four hits in two games from a shortstop who was still working his way back from a sports hernia. A team hitting like that can afford to give its best starter a week off.
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