It’s hard to ever truly trust any reliever. For the most part, a pitcher who ends up in the bullpen does so because there is some kind of significant flaw in their repertoire. The nature of relief pitching means that the flaws can often be effectively buried, but they’re still there. And every now and again, those flaws make their way back up to the surface, resulting in the endlessly frustrating performance variance that nearly every bullpen arm is prone to.
So how much can you trust the Red Sox bullpen? We’ll try to sort that out for the rest of the season, taking a look at the bullpen each month (active pitchers and those imminently returning form injury, only) and deciding just how much faith you can put in each arm at this specific moment in time.