Three things we learned from the Red Sox' 4-2 loss to the Yankees:
1) Eduardo Rodriguez should have been left in the game for the eighth.
Brad Ziegler can't be blamed for what happened in the eighth -- not with the Yankees scoring three runs on a routine groundball to short that resulted in a hit because of the shift, a ball lost in the lights and a swinging bunt in front of the plate.
But Rodriguez was at just 93 pitches through seven innings and had retired the last seven Yankees. What's more, in 14 innings against the Yanks this season, Rodriguez allowed two runs and seven hits.
Rodriguez has the ability to make people swing-and-miss -- hardly a Ziegler speciality, given that he's a pitch-to-contact sinker baller -- and the fewer balls that get put in play at Fenway in the late innings.
John Farrell noted that with the heat and humidity, Rodriguez had done his job through seven. But Rodriguez didn't look gassed and the right call would have been staying with him another inning.
2) Sandy Leon is still raking.
It's mid-August now and Leon has 120 at-bats. That doesn't come close to qualifying him for the batting title, but it's now moved beyond the dreaded "small sample size'' that can discount a player's achievement in fewer games.
And here's the thing: Leon is hititng .383.
A catcher who struggled to hit better than .200 in the minor leagues (end italics) is flirting with .400 at the big league level.
On Thursday, he smacked two more doubles (and a single) to boost his slugging percentage to .617, to go with his .423 on-base percentage.
Those numbers look like a misprint. And they would be easier to dismiss if he had ridden a hot streak for, say, a couple of weeks.
Instead, Leon has played almost a quarter of a season (39 games) and he has a 1.040 OPS, a bit better than David Ortiz.
Baseball. Go figure.
3) The Red Sox finally have their starting pitching straightened out - and it's not enough.
Since July 9, the Red Sox lead all of major league baseball in innings pitched by their starters (171 innings).
That suggests, naturally, that the starters are, more often than not, providing quality outings and pitching well enough to go deep into games.
Case in point: the final two games of this series.
On Wednesday, Drew Pomeranz allowed a single run over 5 1/3 innings. He left with the lead and the Red Sox lost.
On Thursday, it was more of the same for Rodriguez, who was brilliant over seven, yielding a single run. And again, the Sox lost.
For most of the first half, the Red Sox scrambled to find five trustworthy starters to provide them with a chance to win most nights.
The return to form by Rodriguez and the addition of Pomeranz have given them just that.
But thanks to the team's continuing inability to produce hits when it matters most, and some late-inning meltdowns by the bullpen, the improvement in the rotation isn't producing the kind of expected results.