Whitlock allowed one run on one hit while striking out two over two innings in Saturday's spring start against Baltimore.

EDGE Analysis

Whitlock allowed some loud contact during his opening frame, including an Adley Rutschman home run on a 3-1 changeup. Red Sox manager Alex Cora was largely pleased with the outing. "He fell into some deep counts," Cora told Julian McWilliams of the Boston Globe. "Conditions were conducive to fly balls going out of the ballpark. But overall it was a good outing. The quality of pitches was good. So now we move on to the next one." Whitlock is in the mix for a spot in the rotation, but the right-hander said he's not as consumed with being a starter as he was the past two seasons, which have featured injuries and inconsistency. "I kind of took a page from Adam Warren (a former teammate), where he told me, once you adapt that mind-set of being a Swiss Army knife, where you can be thrown into anything and excel, it frees everything else up," Whitlock said. He's in the mix for one of two spots in the rotation along with Kutter Crawford, Tanner Houck and Josh Winckowski.