Eight pitchers. Eight. That’s how many Red Sox arms hit the IL at the same time — Crochet, Gray, Oviedo, Crawford, Sandoval, Houck, Coulombe, Slaten. The Red Sox pitching injuries in 2026 didn’t sneak up on anyone who was paying attention. The staff was constructed from glass, and now the glass is everywhere on the floor.
The excuses about bad luck need to stop. This isn’t bad luck. Bad luck is one ace going down and scrambling. Bad luck isn’t eight guys simultaneously broken while your team sits at 12-20 in last place in the AL East with a 4.79 ERA (23rd in baseball) and a K-rate of 20% (also 23rd). That’s not a rash of misfortune. That’s a design flaw.
And Brayan Bello is out there with a 9.12 ERA and a 1-4 record. In a rotation that FanGraphs ranked No. 1 in baseball before the season. No. 1.
Craig Breslow spent real money. Don’t take that away from him. $130 million on Ranger Suarez. Sonny Gray trade. Acquired Oviedo. Retained Houck and Crawford. Dollar figures aren’t the indictment. Construction philosophy is.
Look at what he actually put together: Tanner Houck returning from Tommy John surgery in August 2025. Johan Oviedo, also returning from Tommy John. Kutter Crawford coming back from wrist surgery in July 2025. Patrick Sandoval, internal brace elbow surgery dating to June 2024. Sonny Gray, 36 years old in the final year of his deal. Suarez, 30, with a documented hamstring history — and sure enough, he exited his May 3 start against the Astros after four innings with hamstring tightness. Garrett Crochet was the one healthy arm in the bunch, and he’s on the 15-day IL with shoulder inflammation retroactive to April 23, per MLB.com.
Crochet’s MRI came back clean — no structural damage. He said himself: “Just some fatigue I was feeling in my last start. I was able to grind through it there at the end, but it makes more sense to get ahead of now…” Fine. Two weeks and he might be back. But that’s beside the point. He was the only bridge arm who entered the year without a surgical scar somewhere on his pitching arm, and the depth behind him was a series of guys on staggered post-op timelines.
As FanGraphs noted, when Crochet went down it exposed exactly how thin the foundation really was. All winter the buzzword was “depth.” Alex Speier wrote it plainly in the Boston Globe back in April: the rotation was “top-heavy and overly reliant on Garrett Crochet and Sonny Gray.” That observation aged like milk left on a car hood in July.
The problem was never that Breslow didn’t build a deep rotation on paper. The problem was that every single layer of that depth was a bet on guys staying healthy through their first full post-surgery season. Breslow stacked fragile pieces and called it a house. There were no durable bridge arms. No insurance. When the timeline started slipping — and post-surgical timelines always slip — every layer broke at once instead of one at a time.
Alex Cora got fired at 10-17. Chad Tracy is the interim manager. Playoff odds are down 26 percentage points from where they were in February. Trevor Story put it out there plainly: “It’s kind of up in the air what the true direction of the franchise is.” A plane flew over Fenway with a banner: “FIRE CRAIG! SELL THE TEAM!”
And Jake Bennett is down in Triple-A with a 0.86 ERA through 21 innings, completely unreachable, because the plan was always that the big arms would stay healthy.
They didn’t.
The Red Sox are calling up LHP Alec Gamboa with Danny Coulombe landing on the IL with cervical spasms, per @ChrisCotillo.
6.23 ERA/4.35 FIP in 13 IP at AAA. 10.3 K/9 and 3.4 BB/9. 57.9 GB%.
Patrick Sandoval moved to the 60-Day IL to open up a 40-man spot. pic.twitter.com/pMfYZiacuh
— Tyler Milliken (@tylermilliken_) May 4, 2026
That’s one more pitcher. One more scramble. One more callup from a system that wasn’t supposed to be carrying this much weight yet. Breslow built a rotation for a world where everything went right. This is the world where it didn’t, and there’s no emergency exit.
