Thanks to Friday’s 19-inning epic, the Red Sox found themselves in a potentially hazardous situation on Saturday. Games of that length always have the potential to screw up the bullpen, especially this early in the season, and with Joe Kelly coming back from a biceps injury, there was no way he was throwing more than 100 pitches yesterday. After playing 2.1 games worth of baseball on Friday night, it was imperative for Kelly to stretch those 100 pitches as far as possible.

Kelly was able to go 7 strong, saving the bullpen from back-to-back extended appearances within a matter of hours. It’s difficult to overstate how important that is. An extra inning night game followed by a day game, combined with a short outing by your starter, can negatively affect your bullpen for weeks or months at a time (sometimes the whole season). This has a much greater effect on the rest of the year than any other early season event or individual performance. In recent years managers have even resorted to sticking position players on the mound in competitive 9-inning ballgames in April and May to save their bullpen for the long haul.

Quick Tangent: Having a guy like Steven Wright at the back end of the pen is a huge luxury. Even though he got sent down to make room for Kelly, and even though he almost singlehandedly drove Lefty to an early grave Friday night/early Saturday morning, he did the pitching staff a huge service by going five of the ten extra frames.

I was flying back to Boston during this one, so I wasn’t able to watch it live (me and Lefty are really on fire here). But from what I saw Kelly looked sharp, having good bite to his slider and a lively 2-seamer. He topped out at 98 MPH on the gun, which is not bad for someone making his first start since mid-March due to an injury to his pitching arm. The result was allowing 1 run on only 1 hit, walking 2, and striking out a career-high 8 men on 93 pitches. After his control briefly abandoned him in the 2nd inning, Joe settled into a nice little groove, setting down 17 straight Yankees (actually I shouldn’t assume, maybe some of them are gay. Or whatever this is.) before exiting.

As expected, Brock Holt and Daniel Nava have been carrying the offensive load for this otherwise light-hitting Sox team. The pair combined to go 6 for 8, with 5 RBIs, 2 runs, a walk, and didn’t leave anyone on base. Really though, this is the beauty of being so deep at every position. They rested some regulars, and Ortiz, Napoli, Sandoval, and Craig combined to go 1-18, but they tied a season-high by putting up 8 runs. The Red Sox were definitely the beneficiaries of some real. Shoddy. Yankees. Defense, but I’ll take it.

Notes:

-It’s early, but it looks like it’s going to be a long season for the Yankees. While this makes me somewhat happy, I really miss the heated rivalry of the late 90s/early 00s.

-Joe Kelly desperately needs a nickname. I’m thinking something old-school like “Pumpsie” since he’s pumping the strike zone with high-octane heat. Let’s try and top that. Any suggestions?

-It was good to see Pedey smoke a double after bouncing into a pair of frustrating double plays earlier in the game.

-The 6-12th rounds of the Garcia-Peterson fight were awesome.