Oh no, that's not how you baseball, Nate Jones

It makes sense that Nate Jones is reporting continuing issues with his gluteal muscle. First, he looks hurt. His once menacing whip of a delivery has become fractured and off-balance. Jones is quickly entering otherwise unprecedented levels of awfulness to start a season.

Jones has allowed the first five batters he's faced to reach base over the two games he's appeared in.

According to Baseball Reference Play Index, Jones is already tied to the ignoble group of relievers who have started their season with two-straight appearance where they have failed to record a single out.

The most recent to do it was Alfredo Aceves, who like Jones, faced five batters through his first two games and couldn't do a thing with a single one of them, yielding four hits and plunking a batter. Aceves was the closer at the time so his struggles provoked a stronger reaction, but it's really a similar situation. Like Aceves, Jones was supposed to be the dominant figure in the bullpen, which suddenly looks a lot worse when its lynchpin is completely unusable. Two years later, the idea of Aceves being viewed as the lynchpin of anything is laughable.

But if there's a sign of hope, the most recent reliever to allow the first five batters to reach on him to start a season was Peter Moylan in 2009. While that name might trigger memories of debilitating injury now, Moylan bounced back to have one of the best seasons of his career, carrying a 2.84 ERA over 73 innings with the Braves, largely propped up by his not allowing a single home run all season (Which Nate Jones is still a candidate, albeit an unlikely one, to do). In his next appearance, Moylan stuck out the side.

Tellingly, the cut-off for these troubles are two games. After which, teams either realize the player can't hack it, or in the case with veterans, they snap out of it or accept that they're hurt. The final one seems to be the case with Jones, which is the closest the Sox bullpen can come to being crippled. In a pen full of raw youngsters, smart rehab projects and undervalued sinkerballers, Jones is the rare arm boasting a recent history of elite bat-missing stuff.

They need him. They don't need him, need him, but if things are going to start looking better in the later innings, they need him.