Pivetta goes on IL with right elbow flexor strain

BOSTON -- Injuries continued to mount for the Red Sox on Tuesday, as the team announced before the home opener that righty Nick Pivetta was placed on the 15-day injured list with a right elbow flexor strain.

“[Pivetta] noted that he was having some trouble recovering start to start,” said Red Sox chief baseball officer Craig Breslow. “We felt like this was a good opportunity to take advantage of off-days early in the season, put him on the IL just to give him a chance to recover.”

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The move was made retroactive to April 6. At this point, the club is hopeful that Pivetta, the team’s No. 2 starter, will be able to return as soon as his 15 days are up.

“I think that’s a reasonable goal,” Breslow said. “Obviously it’s really difficult to put a timetable on these things, but we think that’s reasonable.”

Pivetta will take more of a wait-and-see attitude.

“We'll just see how it goes,” Pivetta said. “I don't really want to put a timetable on this. [I’ll be back] when I'm ready to come back and feeling healthy enough to contribute and do what I love to do and look to not have anything like this happen again.”

Due to the club’s off-day this past Monday, the Sox plan on moving Kutter Crawford, Garrett Whitlock and Tanner Houck up a day for Wednesday through Friday’s games and still have them on the standard four days of rest.

The Red Sox will likely need to call up a starter from Triple-A on Saturday. Righty Cooper Criswell, who battled for a rotation spot late in Spring Training before getting optioned, could be the leading candidate to get that start.

Pivetta broke camp as Boston’s No. 2 starter. In his first two starts, Pivetta was 1-1 with a 0.82 ERA.

In that latter outing, Pivetta threw five scoreless outings against the Athletics but admitted after that game he had far from his best stuff.

“I think it's just kind of been there for a little bit,” Pivetta said. “I’ve just been working through it, but over the past week haven't been recovering the way that I'd like to.”

“As most starting pitchers do, he gets treatment and maintenance, and it didn't seem like anything was out of the ordinary,” Breslow said. “But then he brought this to us just in terms of the trouble recovering [from his last start] was really how he talked about it. He didn’t really mention any symptoms in-game, and it doesn't seem to have affected his performance. So I don't know that we have a firm start date, only recognizing that it got to the level that he felt like he needed to bring it to us.”

Though significant elbow injuries have been a story around the game in recent weeks -- including Red Sox righty Lucas Giolito, who is out for the season following UCL surgery -- Breslow is confident Pivetta’s ailment doesn’t fit into that category.

“Where we are right now, this is the presentation of symptoms and the exam [and the injury] is fairly localized to that flexor area,” said Breslow. “That's what we'll treat, and we feel pretty confident in that diagnosis.”

Pivetta recently underwent an MRI, which gave him peace of mind that nothing is wrong with his UCL.

“That it’s not major is something that's positive,” Pivetta said. “It's definitely negative that I have to miss time. Hopefully it's just a short amount of time and I can come back and just continue to do what I’m doing.”