Suggestions that the Red Sox failed to add a front-of-the-rotation starter at the trade deadline, in some ways, miss the mark. The Red Sox very likely made the biggest rotation upgrade of any contender in the American League over the last month, and it wasn’t Drew Pomeranz.
In early July, president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski surveyed the pitching landscape and arrived at a clear conclusion.
“If people would be looking to say we’re going to be getting someone more talented than Eduardo Rodriguez, it’s not going to happen,’’ Dombrowski said. “They’re just not out there. They’re not out there and available. Sometimes you’ve got to fix some things internally.’’
There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that a) Rodriguez is indeed better than the other pitchers who moved at the deadline, at least among those who are healthy, and b) the 23-year-old and the Red Sox have arrived at a point where the lefthander looks very much like the pitcher who captured the imagination of Dombrowski and evaluators across the baseball world last summer.
Rodriguez was dominant Monday in Seattle, allowing just two base runners — Robinson Cano on a single, Franklin Gutierrez on a walk — through six shutout innings of one-hit ball to sustain a scoreless tie against Mariners counterpart James Paxton. Rodriguez faded in the seventh when, after getting ahead of Cano, 0 and 2, he yielded the first of two doubles in the inning (sandwiched around a walk) to conclude his night with a line of one run allowed in 6⅓ innings.
Still, he did enough, on a night when the Sox lineup was shut down completely through seven innings by Paxton, to give his team a chance to win the very sort of low-scoring, 2-1 game in which it has enjoyed so little success.
It was the signature performance to date in Rodriguez’s demonstration that he has moved beyond his recovery from a knee injury.
His fastball sat between 93 and 94 miles per hour and topped out at 96. Once again, he leaned heavily on a swing-and-miss slider as a weapon against lefties, with four of his nine swing-and-misses coming on his breaking ball (and three of his six strikeouts concluding with that pitch).
He looked like a power pitcher with a three-pitch mix, a pitcher who has moved beyond the issues of tipping and release point and delivery adjustments to be a potential front-line starter.
Rodriguez has made four starts since returning from Triple A after the All-Star break, and in that time, he’s been a completely different pitcher from the one who was demoted at the end of June. In 24 innings, he has a 2.63 ERA with 21 strikeouts and 8 walks while holding opponents to a .247/.309/.393 line, a marked contrast from the 8.59 ERA and .315/.372/.621 line he carried through his first six starts of the year, and more in line with what he did a year ago.
Despite his poor start to 2016, it’s worth noting how distinguished the start of Rodriguez’s career has been. He’s made 31 career starts, and in 13 of those, he has pitched at least five innings while allowing one run or none.
He is the first Red Sox pitcher ever to have that many such starts in the first 31 of his career, and the first American League pitcher since Jered Weaver (2006-07).
Nonetheless, Rodriguez is 2-4 with a 5.91 ERA for the year. And as impressive as he’s been over his last four starts, two came against below-average offensive teams (the Twins and Yankees) and one came amid the forgiving atmospheric conditions of a night game at Safeco Field (the Mariners average 4.3 runs per game at home). Stiffer tests await.
Nonetheless, Rodriguez’s reemergence as a source of stability in the rotation suggests a Red Sox team that has achieved a considerable upgrade in the two-plus weeks since the All-Star break. Rodriguez, who was subject to the trade rumor mill, has a chance to be as big a difference-maker as any contending team acquired in this year’s midseason trade market.
Alex Speier can be reached at alex.speier@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @alexspeier.
