Brayan Bello — the man some once called “Little Pedro” — is headed to Worcester. What a long strange trip it’s been. (Not the trip to Worcester — that’s pretty straightforward, though I don’t envy him making the drive on the Friday of a beautiful summer weekend).
I never really bought into the “mental” explanation of why he performed so much better with an opener this season. It just doesn’t seem to make much sense that someone who has pitched in 112 MLB games in his career would all of a sudden be freaked out by the first inning. But he is human, and the yips are real, and we could be witnessing some kind of fulfilling cycle of first inning doom here. It’s a fascinating thing to watch, really.
So what do the Red Sox do now? Garrett Crochet is not particularly close to returning. The Sox roster isn’t exactly well set-up for bullpen games. And the Sox have 9 games in the next 10 days. Trading Caleb Durbin for Kyle Harrison probably isn’t an option at this point, so is Jake Bennett going to be in the rotation for the foreseeable future, or would you like to see the Sox go another route?
Talk about depth starters, weird mental hangups, and whatever else you want and, as always, be good to one another.
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