Pomeranz started the season on the disabled list, as he suffered a forearm flexor strain in mid-March. He returned on April 20th, after a couple sub-par rehab outings in Triple-A, to pitch against the Oakland Athletics. It wasn’t a glorious return — Pomeranz lasted 3.2 innings, allowed three runs, and didn’t look like he had much of his command or his normal velocity. Since then, he’s been… well, the best description of his 2018 season is a dejected shrug. He’s been fairly unremarkable ever since, and at times his starts have been the visual equivalent of someone dragging their nails across a chalkboard. It should come as no surprise that his next start, which would’ve been today, was pushed back to Saturday against the Atlanta Braves.

Last year, I wrote about how Drew Pomeranz is an underrated pitcher, and how he was much better than people perceived him to be. He turned in a solid 2.6 WARP in 2017, and was more or less a constant in a rotation that had Chris Sale, the bad version of Rick Porcello, and the occasional good start from Doug Fister. In 2018, he’s been anything but, the far-and-away worst starter currently in the rotation, and looking solely at results thus far, the worst starter the Red Sox have, period.

You’d expect some rust coming back from a forearm injury, sure, but he’s had six starts in the majors so far, and he’s looked like a mess. The velocity loss is the most notable sign, as it’s nowhere close to where it was last year.

Apart from the changeup, which isn’t one of his main pitches, everything’s a good two to three mph slower than his norms. It’s more than a bit concerning, especially for a guy with Pomeranz’s injury record.

But he keeps on pitching, sharply diminished velocity and all, and both he and the Red Sox insist he’s health. If you’re a devout pessimist like me, this looks like a perfect, eminently frustrating storm combining a potentially scary injury and deep-seated distrust of the Red Sox medical staff, who have had a near-annual debacle concerning an injured player and their ability to play. While a forearm issue isn’t as scary as something like a shoulder, it could be a prelude to something like a UCL injury in his elbow. Thankfully, it wasn’t, but that doesn’t solve the mystery of the missing velocity or his mediocre production.

Again, both parties say he’s fit as a fiddle. But it does put the Red Sox in a little bit of a bind. As he is now, Pomeranz is a serviceable number four in any rotation, but that’s not how Pomeranz had been pitching the last two seasons, and it’s not like he’s at the far right side of the aging curve — he’s just 29 years old.  They can’t conceivably take him out of the rotation either, since that means giving either Hector Velazquez or Brian Johnson starts, and even with the success they’ve had coming out of the bullpen (and starting this year), having them start for an extended amount of time is asking for trouble. I’m not talking 2011 bad, where the Red Sox ran out guys like Kyle Weiland and an awful, definitely-injured John Lackey down the stretch, but bad enough where you’d actually want this version of Drew Pomeranz to stay. A Pomeranz that resembles anything like last season’s iteration makes this rotation fearsome. The current version downgrades the rotation to simply spooky. Still really good, but not great.

Fortunately, there might be light at the end of the tunnel. Pomeranz told Michael Silverman of the Boston Herald that he might’ve found and potentially fixed what had been the cause of his awfulness. This isn’t the first time he’s had a dramatic uptick in production after a mechanical change — in mid-May of last year, he mentioned everything finally starting to click after a start that month, and went on to be the second-best starter in that rotation. It’s not totally out of the realm of possibility that everything changes on Saturday, but, against my better judgement, it does get my hopes up.

There’s nothing that can be done until we see how he does on Saturday. If he’s good, all of this is just water under the bridge. If not, and he’s seemingly corrected that mechanical problem, the concern will start to grow. Pomeranz says he’s healthy, and the Red Sox have given him the green light to pitch. So until anything changes — for better or worse — we’ve just got to wait and see, and hope Pomeranz is better than this.

Header photo by Bob DeChiara — USA TODAY Sports

As of now, they have three competent starters in David Price, Steven Wright and Rick Porcello. See a common thread here? None of them were homegrown. Price was a big FA acquisition, and Wright and Porcello were obtained in trades with AL Central teams. That leaves two rotation spots for the other starters to fill, and, well, they haven’t been anything close to competent. The melting pot of Clay Buchholz, Roenis Elias, Eduardo Rodriguez, Joe Kelly and Henry Owens has made a really unappetizing stew.

But hey, there’s some slack to cut. Elias, Rodriguez, and Kelly weren’t brought up through the Red Sox’s farm system, and Buchholz has been good in the past. Problem is, he isn’t good anymore. Neither is Henry Owens. And therein lies the core of the issue. The Red Sox, as an organization, simply cannot produce starting pitchers.

When’s the last time you can remember the Red Sox churning out a starter that could cut it in the majors? Buchholz did well for a while, but his trademark erraticism has torpedoed any hope that he could be that good again. So let’s go with Jon Lester. He debuted in 2006, and became a full-time starter in 2008. He is, by far, the best pitcher they’ve developed in recent years, and I’m really straining the definition of the word “recent” here.

There’s been flareups from guys like Justin Masterson and his really good four months in 2009, and Felix Doubront and his strangely decent 2013 season. Other than those 10 months of good pitching, everything has been terrible. That’s not an exaggeration. It’s been so bad that Brad Penny – you know, the dude who could only manage five innings of four-run ball per start in 2009 – has been more valuable in 131 innings than the vast majority of Red Sox-developed starters in the last several years. David Price has already blown past them all as well. Even Eduardo Rodriguez, who we can all agree has been objectively horrifying to watch pitch this year, is worth more than many Sox starters.

So, as a benchmark, let’s use Lester’s promotion to a full-time starter in 2008 as a starting point here. What other monstrosities have the Red Sox minors unleashed upon the major league team? Remember, they’ve had to come up solely through the Red Sox’s system. Also, Brian Johnson is currently exempt, as he’s been snakebitten with injuries, and is being treated for anxiety.

• For starters – pun intended – there’s Charlie Zink. He was a knuckleballer who made a single disastrous start in 2008 and was never heard from again. Think of how a knuckleballer can go bad, and then make it three times worse. Yeah. That’s Zink.
• Michael Bowden probably didn’t get very much of a chance in the majors in the late 2000s, but he was still pretty nondescript in the minors. He was used primarily as a reliever, but the strange, arm-twisting throwing motion of his tended to give away his pitch a lot, and made him very vulnerable to the running game. Never really started again after 2010, and no team took a chance on him.
• Junichi Tazawa actually came into the majors in 2009 as a starter, and unsurprisingly, gave up 23 runs in 25.1 innings. Now you see why he’s a reliever. To his credit, he did have one good start against the Yankees while the entire team imploded around him that year.
• If you can recall specific details from the September collapse in 2011, you probably remember Kyle Weiland. He was so bad in his major league stint that a Terry Francona press conference is all I could find for highlights of him. He added to the collapse by giving up five home runs in 24 innings, and was sent to Houston to fade away that winter.
• Daniel Bard, the starter. You’re sad, I’m sad, so let’s just move on.
• Brandon Workman’s been middling, to put it kindly. A terrible 2014 wiped out whatever good vibes lasted from his 2013 campaign. Then came the Tommy John surgery. He’s slated to be a reliever now as well.
• Hey, remember Anthony Ranaudo? The guy who couldn’t strike anyone out, walked boatloads of batters, and gave up a ton of fly balls? He’s what rock bottom looks like for Red Sox starters. You have to try real hard to get a 6.89 FIP in 39 innings, but Ranaudo put that work in.
• Henry Owens has 13 walks in 12 innings this year. Somehow, the Red Sox won every start he’s made. Sure, there’s hope, but he gave up 7 runs on three separate occasions last year, and the walks aren’t going away.

I’d rather not go on. You’ve seen this story play out over and over again. The Red Sox aren’t developing starting pitchers, and that list doesn’t even include starters acquired from other teams, like Zach Stewart. They even hired Brian Bannister to bolster their pitching corps, and so far, the results still aren’t there. This isn’t Bannister’s fault, but the organization’s as a whole.

Going forward, it doesn’t look much better. Anderson Espinosa is someone to get excited about, yes, and Michael Kopech is also quite good. But it says a lot about the state of Red Sox pitching if their third-best prospect might end up being Jason Groome, the Red Sox’s 2016 first round selection who might opt for junior college to raise his draft stock. That’s not a good situation.

This forces the Red Sox to overpay for starters. Just look at Price’s contract. Or the price tag for someone like Julio Teheran, who would be a mediocre fit in Fenway Park, but would be a much better option than whomever the Red Sox cough up for those last two spots in the rotation. It’s not an enviable position, and if Dombrowski decides to deal, it could quickly deplete a farm system with a big gap between its top four prospects and everyone else.

Look, I realize the Red Sox aren’t the Mets. They won’t churn out a top-flight starter every 12 months. Hell, they can’t even produce a major-league starter in three times that. But it’s rapidly become a chronic issue, especially as the team searches for solutions. At this point, they can’t look internally for help for much longer. The players they need just aren’t there, and it’s been that way for a long, long time.

Photo by Greg M. Cooper/USA Today Sports Images