McAdam: In desperate times, Red Sox taking guerilla approach to games

This is how it has to be now. They've given themselves no choice in the matter.

It's getting late in the season, there's ground to make up in the standings and their starting rotation is decimated by injuries, with their top two starters taking up space on the Injured List as the schedule comes down the home stretch.

It's hardly the prescribed method. But given their level of desperation, they can't afford to be choosy.

For the past two weeks, Alex Cora has been playing a game of whack-a-mole: solving one problem, only to have another pop up out of the ground.



Unable to continue running Andrew Cashner out to the mound as a starter, Cora shifted him to the bullpen and has seen Cashner's stuff play up in relief. Cashner's removal from the bullpen, in turn, created a vacancy in the rotation, which Sunday, he attempted to fill with Nathan Eovaldi.

Eovaldi missed more than half the season with an elbow injury before being re-introduced as a reliever. It took Eovaldi weeks to get comfortable, but in the last week, there were signs that he was regaining his effectiveness. Without any other options, the Sox turned to him to start Sunday after he had given them two scoreless innings in relief Wednesday in Cleveland.

The hope was that Eovaldi could give them 50-60 pitches; instead, he provided 43 -- all of them inside two innings that saw the Baltimore Orioles grab a 5-0 lead.

And so, Cora orchestrated a parade from the bullpen. Six relievers in all marched to the mound, most of them asked to do their small part, biting off three outs at a time.

Darwinzon Hernandez gave up a run in the third, but the relay approach then went unscored upon from the third until the ninth, when a garbage-time run off Travis Lakins barely registered.

Before the game, Cora has tacitly, almost casually, admitted that the bullpen-by-committee approach the team adopted at the start of the season, has been a failure. The trouble, Cora stipulated, came from asking the same reliever -- in this case, Matt Barnes -- to face the toughest part of the order, night after night.

(In actual truth, that's only partly the issue. The other problems came from relievers other than Barnes never knowing when they would be used, and the general lack of quality options. Somehow, the team thought it could miraculously replace the 128 innings eaten by Craig Kimbrel and Joe Kelly without adding any experienced relievers to the mix.).

And now that the rotation is in tatters -- Chris Sale, regardless of what he hears from Dr. James Andrews on Monday, would seem to have thrown his last pitch for 2019 and David Price is still a week away from returning from his second IL stint -- the irony is, the Sox are going to have to depend on their bullpen to bail them out.

The offense is plenty good enough, now second in runs scored and in the top three in virtually every category imaginable. The rotation will, in time, consist of Price, Rick Porcello, Eduardo Rodriguez and Eovaldi.

The rest? Who knows? A spate off-days will make things at least somewhat easier over the next couple of weeks, enabling the Sox to get by with four starters. But eventually, the schedule will get busy again and the Sox will have to patch and fill, the way they did Sunday.

The problem, naturally, is that not every opponent is going to be as beatable as the hapless Orioles, who were given a six-run head start Sunday and still managed to lose by six. That sort of 12-run swing isn't common, and it helped that the Sox are off Monday, enabling Cora to go full-throttle with his bullpen.

Now is no time to mess around. When the Sox have a win within sight, they have to do everything to secure it.

It's as if the playoffs have begun already. Cora continually advises against "chasing wins'' -- that is, selling out to do everything to win that day's game, and damn the consequences -- but now he has little choice but to do just that.

Every game will be an adventure. The pitchers will be pushed and prodded to just get one more out, just finish one more inning. Expanded rosters will provide additional bodies, but their trustworthiness will be limited. Mostly, they'll be around to help out when games, one way or another, get out of hand.

It won't be pretty. And it likely won't, in the end, be successful.

But it sure is going to be interesting to watch.