Most of the baseball world gets to take a break and relax while the game’s All-Stars gather in Cincinnati. Not Boston Red Sox Manager John Farrell. He’ll take a break from the daily ballpark commitments, but he won’t be relaxing.

He’ll be trying to figure out his pitching rotation for the second half of the season.

When the Sox take the field in Anaheim Friday, they will do so with Clay Buchholz on the disabled list. Buchholz has been Boston’s best pitcher for three months. He made it through June without injury for the first time in his career. He just couldn’t make it through July. And while the early reports on his elbow injury were good, having your No. 1 starter on the DL is bad.

That means Brian Johnson will join Eduardo Rodriguez as young starters added to the major-league staff this season. They are two men who were in Double-A at this time last year, and are now going to be asked to help pitch the Sox back into the thick of the AL East race. The Sox will monitor their workloads closely, as they do with all young pitchers, but for the time being both men will be asked to shoulder a fair share of the workload.

“There’s not a hard number or a hard threshold that we’ll try to stay away from,” Farrell said. “Both guys are going to pitch meaningful innings for us. So, to say we’ve got a limit to that, we’re not in the position to put a cap on it.”

The Sox are still short one starter, even after calling Johnson up from Pawtucket. They maneuvered through the last week with just four starters thanks to multiple days off. On Friday, they will begin a stretch of 17 straight days without a break.

That’s why the team went into the break without announcing a pitching rotation for the weekend. Matt Barnes was demoted to Triple-A after Sunday’s game, opening the door for a pitcher to be called up this week. Joe Kelly, who has pitched well in his starts for Pawtucket, is the likely choice to serve as Boston’s fifth starter. Again.

“We’ve got, obviously, some moving parts and haven’t put that in place yet,” said Farrell.

What they have put in place is a first half that still has most of us wondering what this team is. Is it the group that stumbled to a 10-game deficit by late June, or the team that won 10 of 15 games before the break?

That two-week stretch brought optimism back to Fenway. Or, more accurately, the appearance of optimism. The Sox are still a last-place team that is five games under .500. They are seven games behind the New York Yankees in the loss column after losing 6 of 9 games against the Bronx Bombers.

On Sunday, two days after Buchholz left the field with a barking elbow, Wade Miley couldn’t protect a 3-2 lead against A-Rod and company. The bullpen couldn’t keep New York within striking distance. The offense couldn’t break the game open when it was given a chance early.

The only pitcher to get a win over the weekend was Rodriguez, who has shown a maturity far beyond his 22 years of age. Now the hope is that Johnson can follow suit.

The unofficial second half of the season begins with a tough trip through Anaheim and Houston. Boston will face the top two teams in the AL West, needing to play .600 baseball or better the rest of the way.

The trade deadline will be just two weeks away. The Sox will be in on plenty of trade talks, but the biggest additions to this roster might be the young pitchers getting the call from the minors and being thrown into the thick of a season that is on the edge of being “over” far too early.

Tom Caron is the studio host for the Red Sox broadcast on NESN. His column appears in the Portland Press Herald on Tuesdays.

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