BOSTON -- Rick Porcello needed 93 pitches to complete six innings Saturday. But it took only 10 for him to change the tenor of the game.
And if the Boston Red Sox were lucky, Eduardo Rodriguez was taking notes.
Porcello had already dug a two-run hole against the Seattle Mariners when Leonys Martin and Seth Smith opened the third inning with back-to-back singles. A here-we-go-again feeling was setting in at Fenway Park, where in the previous two games Rodriguez and spot-starting Roenis Elias threw stinkers that have become too typical of the Red Sox's rotation.
"My back was against the wall," Porcello said later, after the Sox rallied for a 6-2 victory to square the three-game series, "and I was tested.