BOSTON -- Two starts into a minor-league assignment meant to rebuild his confidence and refine him as a pitcher, Brett Cecil’s return to New Hampshire after three years and 65 big-league starts wasn’t going how he’d hoped. By April 14, he’d been charged with nine earned runs, and yielded 18 hits over 11 2/3 innings — so before his next start, he asked the dad of a Fisher Cat teammate to come watch his side session.

“It was a meeting with Roger Clemens,” Cecil said of the seven-time Cy Young winner, whose son Koby was playing in Manchester at the time. “He told me to stay closed with the front shoulder and it’s really helped me as far as staying on pitches. It’s helped my velocity a little bit — my velocity is more consistently 88, 89, 90 (mph) sometimes — and it’s also about deception. Against lefties I hide the ball a little bit better; lefties and righties, really.”

Parlaying those pointers the 25-year-old lefty yielded just seven more runs over his next seven Double-A starts. And after leaving New Hampshire with a 3.38 earned run average, and renewed belief in himself, it’s now the parent club that is counting on Cecil to continue that progress and help keep them afloat in the American League East.

When the Blue Jays lost three starting pitchers in a week, Cecil was summoned to Toronto after just one stop at Triple-A Las Vegas, and so far he’s done the job. Surrendering only 10 hits and three runs over 11 innings, he’s pitched the Jays to victory in both of his starts, and helped keep them positioned within a game of the Red Sox and two games of a playoff spot before Boston drubbed them, 10-4, on Wednesday.

The team so lacking healthy starters that it signed 49-year-old Jamie Moyer this week, it looks as though Toronto will ask Cecil to bear a similar burden for the foreseeable future — so it’s safe to say he’ll find himself facing much different pressures two months from now than he did two months ago.

But he says himself that he needed that experience to prepare him for the challenges that await.

“It was awesome man,” said Cecil, who was demoted after a poor second half of 2011 led into a rough spring. “I just need to have a couple starts where I felt like I dominated. A hit here and there, or a run, I’d still feel like I’m dominating. I just needed that confidence boost back, and to get my head right.”

Restoring confidence was such a big thing for Cecil that when general manager Alex Anthopoulos gave him the option in spring training, the southpaw chose New Hampshire over Vegas because he feared the frustrations that could come of making good pitches without getting results in the thin-air stadiums of the hitter-happy Pacific Coast League.

He didn’t find the Eastern League much friendlier at first. But in working with Fisher Cats manager Sal Fasano and pitching coach Tom Signore, Cecil said he improved his approach. A former first-round pick who reached the majors at 22, and was a 15-game winner at 23, maybe he got by on talent previously, but Cecil said his time in Manchester introduced to a more cerebral way of attacking hitters — and those smarts have made his four-pitch arsenal all the better.

“It was strategies, and how to pitch guys, and picking up little things that I never used to pay attention to,” Cecil said. “If a guy’s a free swinger, if he’s a pull hitter or a situational hitter. Is he behind in the count, ahead in the count, what’s he trying to do? Man on first, no outs, does he try to pull it or does he try to get situational and get him over? Stuff like that.”

Cecil’s next chance to show what he’s learned comes tonight against Anaheim. Though he doesn’t think of it as an opportunity. He’s happy to be back in the majors, but the lefty said he wasn’t really excited to be promoted because it coincided with the revelation that Kyle Drabek would need Tommy John surgery and join Brandon Morrow on the disabled list.

“I wanted to feel like I earned the spot back — and I did feel like I earned the spot back, and I feel like I deserve to be up here. But we had five guys up here that were dealing and throwing really well and keeping the team in games to win,” he said. “I’m not really looking at it as an opportunity for me; I’m just looking at it as the team needs me, it needs some help, and that’s what I’m trying to do. If I keep throwing the way I’m throwing and it puts me in a position to stay here -- or whatever may come after this — that’s great. But I’m not taking it as a great opportunity for me.”

He may not take it as such. But given the work he put in at New Hampshire, and how important he’s suddenly become to the club, both Cecil and the Blue Jays would surely like to see him seize it.

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After six first-inning runs propelled his team to Wednesday’s 10-4 victory over the Jays, an impressed Bobby Valentine said of his Red Sox, “we hardly swung at a ball out of the zone in the first three innings.”

The manager was exaggerating — but not by much. According to PitchFX, the Sox swung at only six of the 44 pitches Ricky Romero missed with over the first three frames. That’s 13.6 percent; the Sox’s season average entering Wednesday was 29 percent.

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The Sox finished a nine-game homestand with a record of 7-2, which leveled their mark to 21-21 at Fenway Park this season on the same day they slid into a third-place tie with the Rays in the AL East. Boston outscored its opponents 67-41 over the nine games, which included five come-from-behind victories.

Dave D’Onofrio covers the Red Sox for the New Hampshire Union Leader and Sunday News. His e-mail address is ddonof13@gmail.com.