**Anthony's Hand Puts Boston's Lineup on Life Support Before Game 2**

Roman Anthony left Game 1 of the wild-card series with a hand injury, and now the Red Sox are heading into Game 2 without their leadoff hitter and, by the latest count, three additional position players listed as day-to-day. For a team that spent the final weeks of the regular season scoring 2.1 runs per game, losing the top of the order is not an inconvenience — it is a structural problem.

Anthony had been one of the quieter success stories of Boston's September, a young hitter who posted a solid on-base number and gave the lineup something it badly needed: a patient presence at the top. He is not a power bat — his season line reflects that — but in a lineup this thin, the player who works counts and gets on base has outsized value. That role now has to be filled by someone else, and the depth chart does not offer an obvious answer.

This is the part of the season where the injury toll from the last four months compounds. The Red Sox carried 13 players on the injured list into the postseason, and the names that matter most — Gasper, Yoshida, Casas — were already unavailable before the first pitch of this series. Adding Anthony to the unavailable column does not break the team, but it narrows the margin to nearly nothing. Whoever manages the lineup card for Game 2 is working with a short deck.

The pitching will hold, or it won't. Sonny Gray, Payton Tolle, and the rest of the staff have been the reason Boston is here at all. But at some point the offense has to give them something to work with, and right now the question of who bats first is genuinely open.