I've been commenting about not pushing Kelly to AA because there's no reason to, since innings limitations are going to hold him back anyway. But with the bringing up of the Verducci list and how Lester among others has seemingly overcome the concerns this year, maybe it's time to address this a little.

The innings progression concept (no more than 30 or so innings above the previous year for pitchers under 25) seems to be developing into a pretty standard MO among a large proportion of major league organizations, and the Sox seem to be one that keeps it in mind. But let's face it: throughout major league history there have been many pitchers who have ramped up their workload very rapidly in professional baseball and come through it fine, thank you. After all, you've got to start pretty young, and pitch pretty intensively when you are young, to get to the 300 win mark, for example. The question is, who among the pitchers coming up can handle rapid increases in workload, and who can't? The greatest temptation, of course, is to push the workload for the very best pitchers, because their results seem to demand it (does anyone think that if Strasburg starts in the majors next year and is anything like the pitcher people think he will be, that the Nationals will artificially curtail his workload to protect him?) But I guess my point is that while the best pitchers and the pitchers who can withstand rapid innings increases may overlap some, they don't overlap entirely.

Which brings us to Kelly. If he starts in AA in 2010 or starts in Salem and is in AA sometime in May, by the end of 2010 he may be knocking on the door of the majors talent-wise. But is he the type of pitcher for whom it would be OK to push the envelope on innings progression? It looks as if the Sox may have had it figured out OK with Lester, but then, Lester is a horse and he was going into his age 24 season when the big increase occurred. It would be interesting to know how the Sox organization sees Kelly vis a vis innings progression.

The two-way player business is, of course, a complication to all this that has been discussed at length, and there's no point to readdressing it here. If Kelly is going to be pushed beyond standard innings progression, that probably means that the two-way experiment will have come to an end.