Tanner Houck will “most likely” begin a rehab assignment next Wednesday or throw another up-and-down first and go at week’s end, Red Sox manager Alex Cora announced in his pregame media session on Friday afternoon.

“Overall I feel a lot better with the body, delivery, arm especially,” Houck said after his up-and-down on Friday. “I feel a lot stronger and able to execute my pitches. … All in all, I feel good with where I’m at and feel strong and ready to go.”

“He feels really good about it,” Cora concurred after watching the right-hander. “Good fastball, good breaking ball, good split. … Hopefully he bounces back the right way.”

After pitching to a 3.12 ERA over a career-high 30 starts and earning his first All-Star selection last season, Houck has struggled mightily this year. Before the Red Sox placed him on the 15-day injured list with a right flexor pronator strain on May 14 (retroactive to May 13), he posted an 8.04 ERA and 1.695 WHIP over his first nine starts of the season. His 6.10 Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP) is an improvement over the sky-high ERA, but not by much. (FIP is a more accurate pitching metric than ERA – which can become bloated by a team’s poor defense behind a pitcher – because only takes into account events in the pitcher’s direct control: home runs, strikeouts, walks, and hit batsmen.)

Houck said he began feeling the injury “a little bit starting in spring training,” but said he wanted to pitch and was able to do so until it “flared up a little bit more than feels comfortable or what felt comfortable,” and he decided it was “time to take a step back.”

“Just wasn’t quite recovering in the same way that I know my body should,” he said of his bounce-back between starts. “At this point in my career I know where I get sore… I’m a shoulder soreness kind of guy in the back of the shoulder, (scapula) region and for me to get sore in the elbow like that, it’s just not normal.”

Asked if he thought the injury fueled Houck’s rough start to the season, Cora said the righty “didn’t talk too much about it.”

“We pitched him every five days,” the skipper said. “Maybe toward the end it affected him, but early in the season we thought he was 100-percent – I mean, close to 100-percent, of course, and he just needed to make adjustments.”

Houck also pushed back against the suggestion that the injury caused his tumultuous start to the season, explaining that with Hypermobility – a condition in which joints are abnormally flexible – it’s more common for his delivery to get “out of whack.”

“It’s a lot easier for me to get kind of over-rotated, under-rotated, and not quite get to the points that feel comfortable for me,” he said. “I feel like I’ve finally gotten back to that point where I feel really connected to the body and in sync.”

The situation took a toll on Houck mentally and emotionally, too.

“This is what I love to do. I’m all smiles on my face ’cause I got to throw off the mound today,” he said. “That’s what I’ve loved to do since I first stepped on a mound at nine years old, and every time I get to do that I’m a kid in a candy store.”