Connelly Early takes the stage

Following tonight’s loss to the Yankees, Red Sox manager Alex Cora announced that rookie Connelly Early would start Game 3 tomorrow night in New York. I’m not sure this even counts as news.

What other option did the Red Sox have? It’s a cliche to say that the starting staff has been held together by duct tape, and in the case of the 2025 Red Sox, it’s not even true: that duct tape frayed and snapped weeks ago, splattering tendons all over the dugout floor with the sunflower seeds.

And Alex Cora knew this more than anyone. His shocking, go-for-it-now call to pull Brayan Bello before he’d even thrown his thirtieth pitch tonight was a gutsy move, but one he felt he had to make given the state of the Red Sox rotation behind him. Cora saw a pitcher struggling to keep the ball in the zone and getting hit hard when he did. Knowing what was coming tomorrow night, he jumped in to stop the bleeding before the cut even fully materialized. Preventative care at its finest.

But what now? Cora’s gambit, brave though it was, didn’t work. That wasn’t because the bullpen didn’t do it’s job; it did. If you ask for anything more than 2 runs over 5.2 innings from 6 different pitchers then you’re just being greedy. Unfortunately, those two runs were all it took to put away a Red Sox offense that, since the fall of Roman, is less scary than even the Halloween aisle at CVS.

So now we give the ball to the kid — and that term genuinely applies here in light of the fact that Connelly Early has never even pitched on the road in a Major League ballpark. After previewing his swing-and-miss stuff on the road in Sacramento and Tampa, he opens under the harsh lights of Broadway tomorrow night.

Early threw 10.1 innings of shutout baseball with 18 strikeouts to launch his big league career just a few short weeks ago. Those two outings — the first coming on the West Coast against a team casual fans aren’t even sure still exits, and the second coming in the furnace that is Fenway during a September pennant chase — were already enough to make him a future cult hero amongst the type of sicko fans who sit around and remember remarkable but obscure regular season baseball performances 20 years after the fact. (I say this with love and recognition, fellow sickos, as I watch Juan Pena pitch in my sepia-toned memory.)

But if Early comes through tomorrow night — in that ballpark, against that team, in front of those fans — then he’ll etch his name in Red Sox lore. We’ll see him throwing the ball on a crisp October night in the Bronx for the rest of time. That’s a truly fascinating proposition given that he remains so unknown that your mom still says “who’s that nice looking young man?” when he camera zooms in for a close-up.

Tomorrow, for one night at least, a kid who started the season dealing with snow delays up in Portland has a chance to turn himself into the most important man in the baseball world. There’s no way of knowing how the rest of his career will unfold after that. He may only reach the top the mountain for one single night. But in October, one night is all it takes to be remembered forever.