Red Sox vs. Indians Lineups: Dustin Pedroia and Andrew Benintendi sit

The trade deadline has come and gone with the Red Sox making one addition in Addison Reed. Now, the actual baseball continues. Unfortunately, the Red Sox won’t be sending their A-Team to the field with a couple of key players on the bench for the series opener against Cleveland. Before we get to that, though, we look at the starting pitcher. Doug Fister is taking the mound for the Red Sox tonight, which means we could be looking at a long day for Boston’s bullpen. Of course, Fister has shown some flashes in a couple of relief appearances lately, so maybe he’ll surprise us. Stranger things have happened, I suppose.

At the plate, the Red Sox are going to be going up against Mike Clevinger. The young pitcher has big-time strikeout stuff and will challenge Red Sox hitters all day, but he also has some lapses in control. Boston’s lineup hasn’t been able to take advantage of such lapses of late, but it’s basically August now so hopefully they’ll flip the switch because of an imminent and arbitrary flip of the calendar. They’ll have to do without Dustin Pedroia and Andrew Benintendi. The former will be missing his third straight game, and it’s time to start wondering if they should just put him on the disabled list for a few more days. The latter is healthy as far as I know, but is simply getting a day off. The rookie has certainly been struggling of late, so hopefully the day off will do him some good. The full lineup — featuring the Brock Holt/Eduardo Nuñez 2-3 combination we all expected to see — is below.