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.¡±