Major league baseball’s nonwaiver trade deadline this year is Aug. 1. That’s a day later than the traditional July 31 deadline, moved back to keep it from falling on a Sunday.

In Boston, the deadline seemed to come much earlier. Dave Dombrowski, in his first year as president of baseball operations for the Red Sox, made four trades between July 8-15 to rejuvenate the roster.

In a flurry of transactions, Dombrowski added an All-Star pitcher in Drew Pomeranz, an experienced reliever in Brad Ziegler, and positional depth with infielder Aaron Hill and utility man Michael Martinez.

Each move addressed a specific need for Boston. Hill and Martinez are a major upgrade over Marco Hernandez and Ryan LaMarre, who were returned to Triple-A Pawtucket. Ziegler, a submarine pitcher who induces ground balls as well as any reliever in the game, arrived at a time when the bullpen is sagging from injuries to Craig Kimbrel and Junichi Tazawa.

Yet the biggest need of all is starting pitching. Major-league ready starting pitching. That’s why Dombrowski finished off his whirlwind week by trading away Anderson Espinoza, his top pitching prospect, for Pomeranz.

Espinoza has drawn comparisons to Pedro Martinez, and indication of the pitcher he may someday become. That day is years away. Espinoza is 18 years old and had a less-than-stellar first half at Class A Greenville. A lot can go wrong for a pitcher on the road to the major leagues. So Dombrowski, who was hired by Red Sox owners to bring the team back into contention immediately, flipped him for a big left-hander who has finally settled in as a big-league starting pitcher at the age of 27.

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We won’t know how Espinoza will turn out until 2019 or later. The results on Pomeranz will roll in much more quickly. He’ll be on the mound at Fenway Park on Wednesday night as he tries to prove that he can make the adjustment from the pitcher-friendly caverns of the NL West to the bandboxes of the AL East.

Pomeranz is no sure thing. He has bounced back and forth from bullpens to rotations and has now been traded five times. He had to convince the San Diego Padres to make him a starter this spring and added a cutter to his arsenal. The results have been impressive. He comes to Boston with one of the lowest ERAs (2.47) in the majors. Yet he has already thrown a career-high 102 big-league innings. We’ll wait to see if that workload catches up to him.

We won’t have to wait to see what Dombrowski does to give this team a chance to return to the postseason for just the second time in seven years. He has jumped into the arena early and has sent a clear signal that the Sox are all in on their run in 2016. And that’s a refreshing change from the last-place finishes of 2014 and 2015.

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


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