Brayan Bello being demoted to Triple-A also sends a message to the rest of the Red Sox

NEW YORK — Red Sox chief baseball officer Craig Breslow termed it “a really tough decision” to demote righthander Brayan Bello to Triple-A Worcester.

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But was it really?

Going back to last season, including his start in the Wild Card Series against the Yankees, the Sox are 2-11 in the last 13 games when Bello pitched.

The righthander has a 6.38 ERA in those games and put 127 men on base over 78⅓ innings.

Bello gave the Sox little choice but to demote him. It would have been much tougher to explain to the other players why Bello still deserved a spot on the major league roster.

Breslow met with reporters in the visitors’ dugout at Yankee Stadium on Friday afternoon before the Sox beat the Yankees, 5-3. He painted the decision as giving Bello a chance to reset mentally.

“One of the things we asked him to do was fall in love with baseball all over again,” Breslow said. “To go down, to compete — he’s going to work hard, we know that — but to kind of remember why he loved playing this game.”

That was an unexpected answer, given Breslow’s usual disregard for putting emotion into roster decisions. He also seemed intent on smiling throughout the 12-minute session.

Breslow spoke about Bello being better at handling adversity on the mound, something that has been a season-long issue. Bello was unprofessional at times during Thursday’s 8-2 loss against the Orioles when he allowed six runs in the first inning.

“It’s no secret that once things started to go in the wrong direction, they unraveled a little bit,” Breslow said.

The same has been true for the Red Sox as a whole this season. They opened the season 2-8 and haven’t come close to .500 since.

In April, Breslow painted his decision to fire Alex Cora and six of his coaches as being necessary to save the season. Nearly six weeks later, not much has changed. At 27-35, the Sox remain in the lower third of the American League.

The trade deadline is not until Aug. 3, but Breslow received the obligatory question about where the Sox stand.

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“Having a lot of conversations, a lot of discussions. I think it’s been kind of true industry-wide,” he said. “There are a lot of teams that probably feel pretty similarly to us, that they have confidence in their rosters, but they know they’re not playing as well as they’re capable of.”

Only five teams in the AL are over .500, and the wild-card race looks wide open. How does Breslow factor that in with how poorly his team has played?

“We need to run our own race. We need to make sure that we get our house in order. We need to play better; we need to win more games,” he said.

“At that point, we can kind of figure out where we are relative to the lead. But I think the first thing is to continue to build on the progress that we’ve seen offensively over the last month.”

The progress isn’t particularly striking. The Sox were averaging 3.96 runs at the end of April and 4.03 since. Their .740 OPS since May 1 is an improvement, but scoring remains a daily struggle.

Friday was a good example. The Sox had five runs through the fifth inning, then their final 13 hitters went in order with two balls out of the infield.

At some point, it falls on the players to prove they deserve to be supplemented by the deadline. But that surge — winning eight of ten or taking three series in a row — hasn’t happened.

“I have a lot of confidence in the players that we have,” Breslow said. “I’ve seen the way that they’ve grown together, that they’ve taken to the work. They’re committed to doing everything they can to turn this around in the same way that we are.”

Assuming left fielder Roman Anthony returns sometime this month — and that may be too much of an assumption given his slow progress from a sprained right wrist — the Sox could further improve. Even Triston Casas — remember him? — has started swinging a bat again at the team complex in Florida.

Demoting Bello sent a message that even players signed to long-term contracts can be held accountable. That’s a good place to start. We’ll see where it leads.

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