Red Sox hope Eduardo Rodriguez will be the No. 2 starter they’ve been missing

12:34 AM ET

BALTIMORE — In 2011, Dave Dombrowski strengthened the playoff-bound Detroit Tigers’ starting rotation with a trade-deadline deal for Doug Fister. Three years later, he did the same by acquiring David Price. And in both instances, there was a sense of anticipation preceding their first starts for a new team.

Dombrowski felt the same thing about Eduardo Rodriguez’s 2016 debut Tuesday night for the Boston Red Sox.

“It’s like making a trade. That’s really what it is,” said Dombrowski, the Sox’s president of baseball operations. “We’ve really missed him for a third of the season. If you were talking about trying to improve your ballclub and getting a starting pitcher and you came back with Eduardo Rodriguez, I mean, that’s like making a big trade.”

And that was before Rodriguez beat the power-packed Baltimore Orioles, 6-2, with the considerable help of three homers from leadoff man Mookie Betts and fill-in center fielder Chris Young’s homer-robbing catch against Manny Machado in the third inning.

“To have him now join us, this is almost like a trade-deadline acquisition for us,” Red Sox manager John Farrell said of Eduardo Rodriguez’s return to the club. Rob Carr/Getty Images

Rodriguez allowed two runs and threw 89 pitches in six walk-less innings. His fastball reached 94 mph, and he used his bat-slowing changeup as effectively as ever to get swinging strikeouts against Chris Davis in the first inning and Jonathan Schoop in the second. He even bounced off the mound to field Schoop’s tapper in the fifth, showing no effects of the slow-to-heal spring-training knee injury that sidelined him for the season’s first two months.

“It’s good to be back,” Rodriguez said. “First time back, get the win, pitch pretty good, and just locate my pitches pretty good. My …

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