Farrell: Kelly may be a bullpen option for Sox

BOSTON -- When Joe Kelly finishes his stint at Triple-A Pawtucket, there's at least a chance he could be used in the bullpen by the Red Sox.

Red Sox manager John Farrell said the club continues to keep all options open on Kelly. In the words of Farrell, Kelly's first two starts for Pawtucket were "good" but not "dominant."

"I think at some point, he's an option to come back in that [bullpen] role," said Farrell. "To say that there's a prescribed number of starts that we have to see some certain things work out, or we make the decision from there, we haven't said that there's an 'X' number of starts before we would alter his path.

"But he's got bullpen experience at the Major League level. Yeah, there have been times where the workload [in our bullpen], we've had to monitor it very close with Alexi [Ogando] and Junichi [Tazawa] and Koji [Uehara]. Yeah, that conversation, some of that has been had."

In his two Triple-A starts, Kelly has allowed four earned runs over 13 innings.

"The secondary stuff has been sharp," said Farrell. "I know last time out, it was 112 pitches in six innings of work, knowing that there were a lot of foul balls. There were four walks mixed in there. The velocity has been consistent. He went down with two primary objectives and that was to continue to hone the consistent fastball location and have the ability to lead a breaking ball and finish off. Not too unlike what was being worked on here. It's been two starts."