Sunday, December 5, 2010

Rollercoaster

(for the record, yes I was way too ambitious at the beginning of the season, thinking that I could actually write an entertaining blog for every game in the 2010 season...arguably, I didn't write a single one all season)

Ok so disregarding my total abandonment of this blog for the past few months, I just couldn't resist writing again after the up and downs of the last 24hrs+. Of course I'm referring to the Adrian Gonzalez deal which was announced yesterday, blew up (in the media at least) today, and by tonight appears to be back on. I guess it says alot about my passion (that's my word for the idiocy involved in how much I care about a baseball team) for the Red Sox that when I was reading the reports during the day today about the deal falling apart, I actually cracked open Word and started writing a letter to John Henry, here's how I started:

Boston Red Sox
4 Yawkey Way
Boston, MA 02215-3496
Attn: John Henry

Dear Mr. Henry,

I’m writing to you to make sure that you, as the primary owner and individual responsible for the operation and management of the Red Sox, understand exactly how utterly frustrating and disappointed I am in the organization as of Sunday, December 5th regarding the handling of the Adrian Gonzalez trade. First some context, I’m a 42 year old guy with a family, and kids that I’m raising to be Red Sox fans despite us now living on the West Coast.


I literally got so mad just getting to that part that I had to go in the kitchen and complain to my wife while she was making dinner, that conversation went something like this:

me: "Remember that trade I was so happy about yesterday?"
her: "mm hmm"
me: "Well it's off now, I can't believe they're doing this"
her: "mm hmm"
me: "It's just like with #$%!#@ Teixeira 2 years ago, they get to the point where they've got their guy and then they back out. I mean it's absolutely pathetic."
her: "Is it worse than in 2004 when you were so upset after they went down 3-0 to the Yankees?" (ok so actually she said something more like "is it worse than last time you were so mad", but I know what she means).
me: "This is different, that was players this is management. I mean I can't throw a 90mph fastball, I can't hit a 90mph fastball and I'm pretty sure I couldn't field a ball that was thrown by someone who can throw a 90mph fastball to a guy that can hit a 90mph fastball. This is about negotiating and setting expectations, something I can do to some degree. How in the world does the organization get to the point where they pull the trigger on a guy they've apparently been pursuing ever since the screwed up the Teixeira negotiations, I mean surely they knew what kind of contract he'd want when they made the trade right? Theo is all buddies with the GM from the Padres so are you telling me that at no point during the trade negotiations anyone from the Red Sox asked what it might take to get the contract done? "
her: "mm hmm"

I was so obsessed with this thing today that I actually searched on Twitter for the first time just to get updates...just what I needed, another way to fan the fires.

Monday, June 7, 2010

Games 57, 58 & 59 - Red Sox v. Orioles + Indians (@Camden + Jacobs)

After my 3 game hiatus (without a good reason other than tired, daughter's ballet recital and just catching up today), the Red Sox find themselves 4 games out of first and 2 games behind the Yankees for the Wild Card.

They closed out May with the second best winning percentage (.621) in the AL, only behind Toronto.

So far in June (and yes, it's very early), they have the second best winning percentage in the AL (.714), only behind the Angels. And maybe just as importantly, they're the best team in baseball in run differential so far at +25.

They're first in runs scored in June (also now first for the season!), and only 17th in the majors in team ERA. I'm pretty surprised by both of these since its felt like quite a few relatively close games, or at least shutouts. But I guess those games against the A's to start the month skewed the numbers a bit higher than my brain thought they would be.

I admit this is a pretty boring stretch of games (against not good, or even interesting teams), so it's a bit hard to motivate myself to write about the games one way or another. Maybe I need a no-hitter to get me going...

Friday, June 4, 2010

Game 56 - Red Sox v. Orioles (@Camden)

Clay Buchholz has been one of the two best starters in the AL so far this year.

I can't say that I thought I'd be typing that when I started writing this blog, but there it is, and its true. After his complete game shutout of the Orioles tonight, Buchholz is now tied with David Price for wins (at 8) and trails only Price in ERA for AL starters (to be fair, I definitely didn't think the Price/Buchholz combo would be leading the AL pitching!). Clay's strikes/pitches ratio tonight was 0.643, which correlates nicely with the 5 hitter he threw.

At the plate, the Red Sox offense continues to hum along at a pace that is certainly surprising me, and probably alot of other people too, especially when you consider how much time they've played with Cameron + Ellsbury on the DL. I shudder when I see a box score that has Bill Hall playing center, but when your starter is as effective as Buchholz was tonight, who's playing where doesn't matter nearly as much as it did earlier in the season when the starters were getting regularly lit up, and guys like Hall were being asked to actually play defense on a regular basis.

This was a good start to the weekend series, a series that the Red Sox should really sweep, and keep putting some early-season pressure on the leaders in the division (would also be nice if Toronto started to fall off the pace a bit, I've been very surprised that they've sustained their winning ways this far into the season).

Thursday, June 3, 2010

Game 55 - Red Sox v. A's (@Fenway)

I'm not sure if it's the fact that they've been playing against generally weaker teams, or the break (and eventual poor performance) from the Celtics, too much stuff going on at work, or just a sneak peek at what the dog days of summer will be like, but man is it hard to get up for writing this blog lately.

I flipped over to the MLB network during a commercial break of the Celtics/Lakers game tonight (I needed something to take the pain away from watching the Celtics get manhandled by the Lakers, especially by the Laker's defense....yikes, did I really just type that?). I saw the 'full highlights' including two monster shots from Curt Suzuki and two guys getting thrown out at the plate (first Victor Martinez, then Darnell MacDonald). It's hard to pinpoint exactly why, but I feel like this team is pretty uninteresting right now. They've righted the ship since the poor start, but they're not quite red hot either, even the stats from May that I wrote about a few days ago were good, but not spectacular. Maybe it was the fact that after the super slow start (which was a good story in a weird way), I was expecting either a continued decline or a massive turnaround. And while there have been some players with massive turnarounds (Big Papi and Jon Lester to name two), it hasn't happened as a team to the point where it's gripping me to catch the score every day to see who's doing what.

It may actually be related to the Celtics season, where they were completely flat for the last 50 games of the regular season, and then have been on complete fire through the playoffs (well, except for tonight). There's part of me that's waiting for that same kind of explosion from the Red Sox, but it hasn't happened yet.

A weekend series against the Orioles certainly doesn't seem to be the kind of thing that will turn me around...

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Game 54 - Red Sox v. A's (@Fenway)

Good news, the Red Sox have now won 4 in a row over teams that they should be beating (Royals and A's) and have moved ahead of Toronto for 3rd in the AL East (and 2.5 games out of the Wild Card).

Better news, Dice-k was actually fairly effective today. He wasn't lights out by any means, but the 7K's and no walks are encouraging coming from a guy that tends to most of his pitches nibble around the plate. He seems to be pitching more aggressively this year, although interestingly enough, his strike/pitches ratio is only 0.61, a number that's a low for him over his 4 year career with the Red Sox. His walks/9innings are down too, which leads me to think that he's getting more movement on his pitches which is leading to getting hitters to swing at more pitches out of the strike zone?

Best news, my team's computers arrived today :)

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Game 53 - Red Sox v. A's (@Fenway)

When does John Lackey stop sucking?

Sure he got the win tonight, but he gave up 4 runs and 12 hits against the 4th worst offense in the AL, that's hardly a great start from the guy the Red Sox gave a huge contract to in the offseason.

Thanks to some experiences at work over the past few days, I'm seeing alot of things through corporate tainted glasses, including the Red Sox. For example, I have a couple of developers on my team that need new hardware to start work on a new project. Seems simple enough right? I asked about getting the hardware about 2 weeks ago, and even offered to stroll to the store down the street to buy the machines and bring them back. For some reason (that I'm still not entirely clear on), this was frowned upon so I went through the proper channels figuring that it can't take much more than a week to get the machines since I could order them myself and get them about that fast.

Well it's now 2 weeks later and we're still without the hardware. When I asked for a status update early last week, I was told they had been shipped and was given a tracking number to track the package with UPS. The UPS tracking site showed that they were on the truck for delivery that day, so I figured about 2 more days (since my employer has a rather large mail system) to get to my office.

It's now 1 week after that, and we're still without the hardware. When I emailed the mail services team about it today, they (very politely replied), that it had been delivered to the building, and signed for by someone on my admins behalf. So I sent an email to the person who signed, and my admin to see if the hardware had arrived.

They don't have it.

So I've now spent 2+ weeks waiting for this #$%!^ hardware that I could have just gone down to the store to get 2 weeks ago.

How does this relate to the Red Sox.....actually, hell if I know, I'm just too pissed off about this hardware order (and the incredibly inefficiencies that it exposes in my company's process, and to some degree culture) to write about the baseball game tonight.

Sunday, May 30, 2010

Game 52 - Red Sox v. Royals (@Fenway)

I've been touting individual stats quite a bit over the course of the first 51 games, with lots of comparisons and splits analysis (especially over time) to indicate how hot/cold individual pitchers and hitters have been. But after yet another good start from Jon Lester and yet another (over the past few weeks) day at the plate from David Ortiz I felt that going back to that well of 'Ortiz is the third best hitter in May' stuff would be overdoing it so I'll take a look at team stats over the month of May. Of course the fact that today was their last game in May gave me some good inspiration too :)

Offensively, the Red Sox finished May with the following standings across all of MLB (note that since some teams will be playing on Memorial Day, the positions could very well change, although probably not dramatically):

Runs scored: 1st (tied with 158)
Home runs: 3rd (with 40)
OPB: 5th (at .349)
SLG: 3rd (at .460)
OPS: 2nd (at .810)

So the offense is clicking right along, with numbers heavily influenced by great months from David Ortiz, Kevin Youkilis and Adrian Beltre). But since they were ranked in the top 5 in offense in April, this isn't eye opening, just a good sign that the offense we saw early isn't a fluke.

Pitching-wise, we saw the beginning of the turnaround for the staff as a whole:

Wins: 4th (tied with 17...worth noting that they tied Toronto and Tampa Bay)
ERA: 20th (at 4.40)
BAA: 6th (at .239)
WHIP: 15th (at 1.34)

On the surface, only the Wins total looks especially good (which after all is the only number that really matters). The biggest change month-over-month was in the BAA, which went from .262 (18th best) in April to .239 (6th best) in May. The biggest contributors to the improvement? Some expected, and one big surprise:

Jon Lester: .161 BAA (3rd best, and best in the AL)
Daisuke Matsuzaka: .218 BAA (28th best, and 13th best in the AL)
Clay Buchholz: .257 BAA (68th best, and 29th best in the AL)

And in the bullpen, the setup men and closer had very good months:

Manny Delcarmen: .152 BAA (ERA of 1.98)
Daniel Bard: .184 BAA (ERA of 0.79)
Jonathan Papelbon: .189 BAA (ERA of 3.60)

Almost as important as the names that are on the list, are the names that aren't on the list, most notably Josh Beckett and John Lackey. If those two come back to be anything close to what we were expecting at the start of the season, and the rest of the staff continues to deliver at anywhere near what we saw in May, this is going to be a very, very tough team as the weather heats up.

Saturday, May 29, 2010

Game 51 - Red Sox v. Royals (@Fenway)

How good has Clay Buchholz been lately? He's 4-0 in his last 4 starts (including tonight's game), with the following totals:

IP: 27.1 H: 18 ER: 4 BB: 11 K: 22

Which gives him an ERA of 1.32 and a WHIP of 1.06. And its not like he put those numbers up against bad offenses, with starts against the Twins, Tigers and Rays included there. My personal favorite stat, especially for Clay had him at 0.592 strikes/pitches which is below that 0.60-ish number that seems to mean success for him. It's only one game so I won't try to extrapolate too much, but maybe the fact that he still had a very strong start while going below the magical number indicates some kind of maturation as a pitcher? It wouldn't be completely unreasonable to think that a guy who now has 40+ starts in the majors, the most recent 20 or so with very strong results, is gaining more and more confidence by the outing.

With the Yankees loss today (that had to hurt given how badly Joba coughed it up), the Red Sox are now 2 GB in the Wild Card race and still 6.5 back behind the Rays.

Disclaimer: hokey tie-in to real life coming up...
Now that the Red Sox seem to be really executing on that pitching & defense style that they built the team around in the offseason, I'm beginning to like what I see (and yes, winning certainly helps). In general, I do prefer to see the 1-0, 3-2 types of wins instead of the 13-11 scores like the Yankees and Indians had today. And I can't help but draw an analogy to my son's reaction to doing 'free form' lego building today. The setup is that he loves Legos, but only has done the kits so far. He really gets into the instructions and looking for the right pieces to follow along with the instructions, but he got an issue of the Lego magazine (which is really brilliant marketing) recently had it has a contest to build a farm Lego (anything you want) and send in a picture of your creation. If you win, you get a $100 gift card to a Lego store. So we started working on it today, just breaking up all his existing cars and buildings so we had a good supply of parts, and I started making a cow out of random white and black blocks. He was trying too but got frustrated pretty quickly by the lack of instructions. I kept trying to tell him that he could just wing it and do whatever he wanted, but he just couldn't get into it. At a certain point he got so frustrated that he left the room, very upset. He came back a few minutes later and tried again, following my lead a bit to make his own cow. I encouraged him with whatever pieces he used or wanted, and then a light went on. Suddenly he had built 'Super Cow' and he was so into it, there was no going back. All through the rest of the day he would go back to his room for a bit to make some modifications (including wings, a fire and a 'laser shooter'...this was a very super, super cow!). So it took a little effort and pain, but once he made the turn to the free form Legos he was all over it....kind of like I'm getting with the pitching + defensively minded Red Sox :)

Friday, May 28, 2010

Game 50 - Red Sox v. Royals (@Fenway)

So, yeah, how about them Celtics? Pretty amazing performance from Nate Robinson tonight, as far as I can tell the guy has barely played at all this postseason, then he jumps off the bench and scores 12 in less than 10 minutes right when they needed it (since Rondo was out with after taking that nasty spill). So, uh...yeah, Beat LA!!

Um, what's that, the Red Sox played tonight too? Hmm, let me see what the score was...

WTF??!?!?! They gave up 12 runs to the Royals?? Who much to my surprise are currently middle of the pack in the AL for runs scored...did Willie Wilson and Bo Jackson come out of retirement? I saw Wakefield's line for the night, and decided to check out what his GameScore was, and he got a -1. I didn't even know that was possible, but he did it. Inspired by Wakefield's performance (or maybe so horrified that I have a morbid curiosity now), I decided to check game scores for other performances that come to mind, to see how bad he was in a historical sense. This is hardly an exhaustive survey, just remembering some other memorably bad games in Red Sox history. Interestingly enough, the ones that immediately come to mind are where the Red Sox batter the opposing pitcher.

June 27, 2003 - Carl Pavano didn't get an out, gave up 6 ER on 6 H on way to a 25-8 loss to the Red Sox. His game score? 14

October 16, 1999 - Roger Clemens pitched 2 IP, and gave up 5 ER in the ALDS (I was actually at this game at Fenway...Pedro v. Clemens, it was billed as a heavyweight match). His game score? 24

Ok, so I guess my memory isn't all that great because I couldn't think of any other good examples of bad games. So rather than rack my brain, I decided to spend some time building a game score calculator in JavaScript (see below) so if I think of others, I can just calculate the score here (note, if anyone tries it and finds it useful, post a comment with the game you tried and the score :) )

To use the JavaScript GameScore calculator, just enter the stats in the boxes below and as you move onto the next field, the points box at the bottom will update with the game score!



Total innings:

Innings after the 4th:

Strikeouts:

Hits:

Earned Runs:

Unearned Runs:

Walks:

GameScore:

Thursday, May 27, 2010

Game 49 - Red Sox v. Royals (@Fenway)

It's ironic that after running the gauntlet against the Yankees, Twins, Phillies and Rays (three first place teams and the current AL Wild Card leader) on the road, the Red Sox returned home tonight and lost to the lowly Royals.

Is there such a thing as letting your guard down in a game like baseball that in general, has fewer emotional highs and lows than in sports like football or basketball, which have shorter seasons (so more pressure per game) and run on more emotion (due to the high energy levels involved)? It's hard to say that was the case tonight, especially after watching Hermida botch a flyball to left that led to a run in an eventual 1-run win by the Royals. Also hard to say that it was a letdown looking at the box score and seeing Dice-K walk 8 guys in 4 and 2/3 innings (en route to throwing 112 pitches in less than 5 innings). And yeah, its even hard to say after seeing Dice-K allow a run on a wild pitch (after loading the bases with only one hit). Ok, ok, ok...no letdown theory in this one, just bad pitching and some shaky defense.

Obviously the bigger news in the Boston sports scene these days is the Celtics, who looked pretty bad last night against the Magic and the media is now all over as a team that looks very vulnerable. I didn't watch the whole game and missed most of the controversial calls (here's the crummy YouTube video since for some reason, finding high-quality video of the game is harder than my 15min of blogging/night allows)

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Game 47 - Red Sox v. Rays (@Tropicana)


One win against a good team (Philadelphia) when you're struggling doesn't even raise an eyebrow.

Two wins in a row against a good team (Philadelphia) when you're struggling looks like a fluke.

Three wins in a row against good teams (Philadelphia then Tampa Bay) makes you think there may be something to this.

Four wins in a row against good teams (Philadelphia then Tampa Bay) gets you excited for tomorrow's game.

That's really the best way to describe it right now, I'm actually looking forward to tomorrow's game instead of dreading it (worst case), or just being totally ambivalent to it (best case). The Red Sox are really starting to hit a stride that we had all hoped they would. Red Sox starters over the last 4 games, against very good lineups, have allowed one earned run. The Red Sox pitching staff has held Tampa Bay to one run in the last 18 innings, a season low in back to back starts for Tampa Bay (previous was 2 runs in 2 days against the A's on May 8 + 9, and that was on the road in Oakland).

Jon Lester is really establishing himself as the ace of the staff, and he's arguably the best left hander in the majors over the past few seasons. This year he's 6th in WHIP and tied for first in SO among left handed starters in the majors after tonight's start. And then there's Big Papi, with the following stats over the last 30 days:

AVG/OBP/SLG HR RBI
319/375/681 8 20

Things are indeed turning around...

Monday, May 24, 2010

Game 46 - Red Sox v. Rays (@Tropicana)

Dare I say, things appear to be turning around?

This was a very good win tonight, not only because it was against the best team in the majors, on the road, and THE division rival at this point in the season, but also because Clay did it again. He's had a very strong start (6IP, 6H, 1BB, 8K) against the 4th best offense in the majors (in terms of runs scored). Clay is now 11th in the AL in ERA and second in the AL in wins, leading the team with 6. And yes, wins are largely meaningless for starters, but I had to throw that in since I have him in one of my espn fantasy leagues (a team that ironically also has Lester and Beckett, so I'm struggling for W's...go Clay!)

At the plate, Big Papi is clearly coming around with a 1.337 OPS over the last 7 days, joining both Kevin Youkilis (1.609) and Victor Martinez (1.400) in the top 35 in the majors for that time period. So the offense is chugging, and the pitching is shaping up, I've even seen much better defense of late (granted, this is largely anecdotal from a handful of web highlights and a few innings here and there from national broadcasts, but hey, it's something).

The Red Sox have won 3 in a row now and are 7.5 games behind Tampa Bay, 2.5 behind the Yankees for the wild card. It's way too early to really put much stock into either number, but at least the deficit is heading in the right direction for once this season :)

Sunday, May 23, 2010

Games 44 & 45 - Red Sox v. Phillies (@Citizens)

I was saying to my wife over breakfast today that there would be a lot of disappointed readers today since I didn't get a post in last night about the Saturday night game against the Phillies. The conversation went something like this:

Me: "There will be alot of disappointed readers on my blog today"
Her: "Mmm hmm, and why is that?"
Me: "Because I didn't blog last night, and I had promised a movie review"
Her: "Mmm, hmm"
Me: "But don't worry, I've got a backup plan"
Her: "Mmm, hmm"

At that point I could take the hint so I moved back to eating my waffles.

So yeah, I didn't get a post in last night after Dice-K's near no-hitter, no excuse other than just too tired to get on the computer. We had gone out for pizza with the kids after watching a little of the Celtics game at my in-laws house and over dinner I checked the Red Sox score on my phone. It was the 6th and the Phillies didn't have a hit yet. Being the naturally superstitious baseball fan, I didn't say anything other than show my wife the box score and point at the hits column for the Phillies. I guess my finger was too fat or pointing in the wrong place because she said "is there something special about Placido Polanco?". I recalibrated my pointing and then she caught on and gave me the good advice of putting my phone away during dinner so I wouldn't jinx it. Dice-K may have lost the no-hitter in the 8th, but at least it isn't hanging over my head today.

The performance overall put me back into the well-maybe-he-CAN-contribute-something-this-year camp after all. I was pretty disgusted with him after the start in New York last week, but throwing a 1-hitter against a good Phillies offense isn't anything to sneeze at, so I'll hold out some hope, I guess we'll need to give it a month or so to see what he's really got this year.

Today's game was even more encouraging. The game was on TBS so I watched most of it, and while Roy Halladay clearly didn't have his best stuff today (lots of pitches out over the middle of the plate), the Red Sox offense looked very good in taking advantage of all the mistakes. Youk in particular hit some rockets, which reminded me of the way he was hitting the ball in 2008 (everything was hard, even outs), and having Ellsbury back at the top of the order makes the lineup tougher because Scutaro is a reasonably tough out in the bottom third. So they did what I was hoping for (take 2 out of 3 against the Phillies), and now head to Tampa Bay for another 'must win 2 out of 3' series (at least in my mind). I look at the need to win games more to show themselves (and fans of course) that this actually is a good team more than to make up ground in the standings, there's plenty of time left in the season for the latter, not as much for the former.

Now the really tough news, no movie review. After we dropped off the kids at the in-laws we realized we didn't have enough time to make any of the three movies we had talked about, so decided to get some lunch instead. The food was good, but the place (Cactus in Alki) had one problem for me, slow service getting water refills. To be fair, I do drink alot of water with my meals, but the combination of small-ish water glasses and slow rounds by the waitress to refill left me thirsty...and sparked an idea. In addition to reviewing restaurants on food (with stars), cost (with dollar signs), how about rating a place based on the size of the water glasses? Sure it would only be of interest to the handful of other thirsty diners like myself, but I would absolutely pick a restaurant based on this criteria if all other things were equal. The larger water glass makes my meal more enjoyable because I don't have to be on the lookout for a waitress while I'm eating, rationing out my water so I don't run out before I get a refill.

So there you have it, hopefully the brilliant water glass restaurant review metric idea makes up for the lack of post yesterday!

Friday, May 21, 2010

Game 43 - Red Sox v. Phillies (@Citizens)

When does John Lackey start to turn it around?

With the recent performances from Lester and Buchholz, and putting Beckett on the DL (which is good news as long as it's not a serious injury since it means that Beckett's poor start is due to injury), it's time for Lackey to start pitching like the guy who signed that big contract in the offseason. Lackey's ERA in May is now up to 5.46, which is not only high, but a little troubling given his ERA in the April/May over the past 3 seasons has been:

April: 2.19
May: 3.08

So, unlike Lester, he's not a traditionally slow starter. I'm guessing part of it is trying to prove his worth to the team, since Lackey has always come across as a guy with a ton of pride in his work. Compared to his career stats, Lackey's strikeouts/9innings are down (5.6 this year compared to 7.1 over the previous three) and his walks/9innings are up this year (3.8 this year compared to 2.3 over the previous three), which obviously is impacting his overall effectiveness.

By the way, kudos to the Angels fan (at least I'm assuming it's an Angels fan) who sponsored Lackey's page on baseball-reference.com, I like the Benedict Arnold reference and it's surprisingly bitter coming from a laid back Californian :)

Looks like my wife and I may end up seeing a movie tomorrow, candidates include Date Night (meh), Robin Hood (yay) and MacGruber (I can't believe I just typed that), so hopefully I'll have a movie review + a post about a Dice-K shutout to write about tomorrow night!

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Game 42 - Red Sox v. Twins (@Fenway)

I have to admit, I barely know that they won today given a way too busy day at work and just a few minutes on the bus ride home to check the score on my phone. I guess Lester pitched quite well, and the offense is continuing to do its job.

Big series coming up against the Phillies, a team that is not only good (like the Twins), but playing well recently (unlike the Twins). The pitching matchups:

Fri: Lackey v. Hamels
Sat: Matsuzaka v. Kendrick
Sun: Wakefield v. Halladay

Don't look super inspiring (that Saturday game looks like a fireworks explosion just waiting to happen), but winning 2 out of 3 doesn't look impossible if they win Friday night. Given the Red Sox have hit lefties fairly well so far this year (team OPS of 0.814 v. 0.794 for righties), there's reason to believe they'll win that game IF (and it's a big if) Lackey gives them a strong start. He really only needs to give them 6 good innings since the bullpen is rested thanks to Lester's CG tonight.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Game 41 - Red Sox v. Twins (@Fenway)

First things first, Clay's strikes/pitches ratio was outstanding tonight at 0.653, which translated to a very strong start and a Red Sox win against a good Twins team. It sure would have been sweet to have three in a row against top teams in the AL, but I'll take the 2 out of 3 given that Monday night was just a choke job by one guy (a very important guy, but still just one guy). With the win, the Red Sox are still 8.5 games out of first, but only 4.5 games out of the Wild Card, which based on the torrid pace the Rays are on, is what the Red Sox should be shooting for.

Also, in a strange way, I was glad to read that they put Beckett on the DL. You never want to see a guy get hurt, but I'm interpreting this as there really is something physically wrong with him, which lessens the sting of his poor start to the season. Hopefully with the downtime, his back heals up and he comes back in a few weeks in the form that we all expected him to be in at the start of the season.

Back to Buchholz, he's been the best of the starters so far this year, leading the team in ERA, ERA+ and Wins. Let's hope that the other guys start following suit!

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Game 40 - Red Sox v. Yankees (@Yankee Stadium)

Thanks to MLB Network I was able to catch the last inning on TV tonight, it was actually on even earlier but I chose the Celtics/Magic game over the Red Sox. I made the right choice given how great of a game the Celtics game was, Jeff Van Gundy said at some point that this Celtics team is every bit as good as the team that won the NBA championship in 2008 and I agree. The declines (due to age) of Allen, Garnet and Pierce have been offset by the emergence of Rondo, the guy is just a stud and I don't see anyone of the remaining point guards being able to slow him down, never mind stop him.

As for the Red Sox, it was yet another up and down game. Beckett stunk once again, and Papelbon was super shaky in the 9th, but they got the win and thats what matters. The question I keep asking myself is, how long does John Farrell have as the pitching coach? If there's nothing physically wrong with Beckett, and there's no reason not to put him on the DL given that they have Wakefield in the pen, then I see a trend of bad mechanics in a bunch of the pitchers, most notably tonight's starter and closer. Beckett has the worst ERA in the majors among starters with enough innings to qualify, and Lackey is 86th. That's absolutely abysmal for two guys that are making big money on new contracts. I'm sure that part of their struggles are due to pressing, they both come across as driven, emotional guys, but there's also part of this that has to fall on the pitching coach (again, if no injuries are involved) since there's nothing in either guy's track record that would lead you to believe they'd be this bad.

So they're back at .500, 8.5 GB the Rays who just never seem to lose, and heading home to play the Twins and Phillies for the next 5 at Fenway. I'm very much in 'prove to me I should get excited' mode at this point, a 4-1 run over the next 5 would at least get me going in that direction.

Monday, May 17, 2010

Game 39 - Red Sox v. Yankees (@Yankee Stadium)

I'm not going to panic.

I'm not going to panic.

I'm not going to panic.

Ok, so maybe I'm not going to panic, but I am going to get pissed off. What the F was that tonight? Sure, the offense looked pretty good. But you've got to be freaking kidding me with the PATHETIC performances from Dice-K to start the game and Papelbon to end it. I guess I should be more ticked off at Papelbon, given that the Sox fought back to take the lead in the 8th, only to see him completely and utterly implode in the 9th, but that P.O.S. performance by Dice-K to start the game shouldn't be overlooked either. The first 6(!) goddamn hitters in the first made it on base, before he retired Thames on a sac fly to center, which was the second out...the first coming on a play at the plate. That's an incredibly weak start from a guy who has a ton to prove this year, and actually showed some signs of proving it in his last start. Dice-K's line for the night was a horrid:

4.2IP 9H 7ER 3BB 3K

I think he's got another start for sure, but if he bombs in it the Red Sox can't be patient, time to get Wakefield back into the rotation and let Dice-K figure out his act in either triple-A or the bullpen.

And then there was Papelbon. Watching the highlights of the 9th, he had no control whatsoever. The ball that A-Rod hit out to tie the game was supposed to be down and inside and Paps threw it high and outside. Then the pitch to Thames was supposed to be down and away, instead it was mid thigh and inside. You have to give the Yankees credit for taking advantage of the mistakes, but this was just pathetic pitching from two guys that are getting big contracts and need to do better, especially in big games like this.

The thing that made the game especially tough was that I had checked the score on my way home and saw it was 6-1 early, so gave it an 'wtf dice-k!' in my car, then started to accept the fact that the season was sliding away very quickly now. That turned into excitement when I checked the score after dinner on my phone (while my kids were playing games on sproutonline.com), and saw that they had clawed back to take the lead at 9-7. This was it! (I told myself), the game that was going to turn the whole season around and spark that big run that the Red Sox so desperately need to get into the race. Then I flipped my phones score mode to 'at bat' mode and saw that Gardner doubled, and my stomach started to turn like it has so many times (albeit not as much over the last few years), knowing that Teixeira and ARod were coming up with good chances to tie it. After the Teixeira out, the scoreboard on my phone said 'in play, run(s) scored' for ARod. I frantically hit refresh as I tried to get a 3G signal (the reception in my home office is spotty), until there it was, 2 run homer to tie it....f it (using my inner voice of course).

Thank god the Celtics are playing tomorrow, I'm afraid of what kind of carnage there might be with Beckett on the mound against the Yankees.

Sunday, May 16, 2010

Games 37 & 38 - Red Sox v. Tigers (@Comerica)


There were a couple of disappointments this weekend. First, my streak of blogging right after each game was broken. It was actually broken on Friday night when I konked out on the couch around 9pm watching something on the Food Network with my wife, too tired to even check the score, never mind crank out one of my exceptionally high quality blog posts, I shuffled off to bed dreaming of Rachel Ray and Guy Fieri in some weird dream that I won't recount here (other than to say, there was food involved). So like an aging slugger, I tried to shrug it off and come back strong on Saturday, but admittedly went the blogging equivalent of 0-4, with a couple of strikeouts (one looking). I wrote about Friday's game but barely checked out the box score and highlights before (or during) my writing. When I went back to review the tape I saw that I wrote one thing (about the Tigers being a good offensive team) without checking my stats to see they're actually a middle-of-the-road offensive team (at least in terms of runs scored). I even caught the error but just posted the blog anyways, not a strong effort at all.

Then on Saturday I spent several hours out in the yard digging up a flower bed to make way for some new dirt. The stuff around my house is all rocks, clay and sand, so even digging a 15ft long x 3ft wide x 1ft deep trench is a back breaker. Everything, including my lifeblood, typing hands (as opposed to my driving hands which are still pristine) was aching so again I shuffled off to bed early. At least last night I had some semblance of hope that things were really turning around for the Red Sox. Earlier in the day we had a guy come buy to go over a window estimate for our house and the guy was a baseball fan (apparently from the Bronx but he was smart enough not to bring this point up too often for fear of losing the sale). He mentioned how Big Papi had a good game the night before and I had just checked Saturday's score on my phone to see more good signs from Papi. The score was 6-2 with a resurgent Lester on the mound so things seemed in good hands.

I wake up today, do some more godawful digging in the yard then come in to have breakfast and check the scores from last night....and they lost. Ok, I think, well at least we can get 2 out of 3 to start the road trip, which at this point is progress. But then Lackey goes out and struggles (again) and we end up losing 2 out of 3 to the Tigers. This shouldn't be a big deal, but when the Red Sox are clearly struggling to get something going, they really need to start putting some series wins together and while the Tigers are good, they're certainly a team that the Red Sox should be taking 2/3 against when Verlander isn't seeing the mound in the series, and Lackey + Lester are.

I'm seriously beginning to lose hope, just as I'm planning a trip back east with my family, and we're picking dates so we can see a Sox game at Fenway.

At least my back feels better today.

Saturday, May 15, 2010

Game 36 - Red Sox v. Tigers (@Comerica)

Let's hope this was the beginning of a hot streak for Big Papi, 2HR (and from what I read today on Boston.com, they were blasts). The Red Sox offense has been a pleasant surprise so far this season even with very little contributions from Papi, but getting his bat back into the swing of things (pardon the pun!) would go a long way to making this team tougher as we start to head into the summer.

Clay Buchholz's start was effective, although a little ugly when looking at the 5 BB and 111 pitches it took him to get through 6 1/3rd innings. On the bright side, this is a good sign that he can still be effective even without his control (which I've written about a few times already this season). For comparison, his strike/pitch ratio for this game was only .576, which is well below the 0.61-ish number that it seems come with his best starts. But the fact that he still only allowed 1 ER and 3 H against a reasonable good offense is encouraging. Actually now that I look the Tigers aren't all that great at the plate, they're 14th in MLB in runs scored despite having good starts from Cabrera, Jackson, Damon and Ordonez. Looking a little deeper they're team OBP is very good (4th best in MLB), but their power isn't comparable at 12th in MLB. Given that, the 5BB makes sense...not so bad after all Clay!

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Game 35 - Red Sox v. Blue Jays (@Toronto)

Tough loss today given the goings on in the 9th inning with Dale Scott blowing not one, but two calls. I've always had Scott next to Tim Tschida (he of the 'Knobby' comment in the postgame interview of a 1999 playoff game between the Yankees and the Red Sox, pictured here), as one of my least favorite MLB umpires, and he came through in spades today. The video from MLB.com really shows it all, from the horrible called strike 3 against Papi on a ball 8" off the outside edge, to the pathetic called strike on a check swing by Adrian Beltre immediately after that. Obviously these calls didn't cost the Red Sox the game, but they sure didn't help either. Boston.com has a nice graphic of it too, I love that this data is available for anyone to see now, hopefully it keeps umpires a little more honest.

So that was the game, now time to both praise MLB and knock them...first the sugar. I'm glad that mlb.com had the video that I linked to above, it would have been easy for them to edit out the questionable calls, especially since with all the replays and strike zone graphics, you can really see how bad the called 3rd strike is. So kudos to them for showing the video even though it makes one of their employees look...well, not so good. Now for the vinegar...why can't these coders over there get a freaking embed button on their video player so I can just put the video on my blog? Is this some kind of legal issue or just blatant omission from their video player? And even if it is a legal issue (because I know its not a technical issue), can we at least get a button to get the link to the actual video guys? They have buttons to post to Facebook, Twitter, Digg or even email it to someone, but no place to just get the damn link and copy it (I had to email it to myself to get the link for this blog). C'mon mlb.com, you're making the guys at espn.com look good.

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Game 34 - Red Sox v. Blue Jays (@Fenway)

Thank god for the Blue Jays. Just when you're ready to get down in the dumps about the season after losing 2 out of 3 to your biggest rival, in stroll the Blue Jays for a quick pick me up. Sure the standings say the Blue Jays are 0.5 games better than the Red Sox so far this year, but with a 5-0 record against Toronto it's hard to see that lasting much longer.

The big story in tonight's game was the battery, Dice-K pitched very well (3H and 0BB, the latter being the big story for a guy who is notorious for being a nibbler), and Jason Varitek hit his 6th HR of the season, so he's second on the team despite only having 38 AB!. To put that in perspective, his HR/AB ratio is 0.15, based on that, there's a 15% chance he'll hit a home run when he steps to the plate. Of guys with 6+ HR here are his closest competitors:

Paul Konerko: 0.13
Nelson Cruz: 0.11
Rod Barajas: 0.10
Andruw Jones: 0.09
Jason Heyward: 0.09

Actually now that I look at some stats, the bigger story really is Dice-K. This was arguably his best start since late 2008. The last one that's comparable to this was against, you guessed it, Toronto when he had this line on September 21, 2008:

7.0IP 2H 0R 2BB 6K 109pitches

I had heard he was throwing well in the minors and maybe even feels that he has something to prove after the lousy season he had last year, but could he really round into the same form as 2008? Actually I'd like to see him do even better because that year I remember lots of games where he got wins, but was frustratingly hesitant to throw strikes to batters on any consistent basis (his strike percentage in 2008, 61% was actually lower than 2009 when it was 62%). Tonight he was at 67%, let's hope he keeps those numbers up in his next start which should come next Monday against the Yankees in NY.

Monday, May 10, 2010

Game 33 - Red Sox v. Blue Jays (@Fenway)

Seriously, what is going on with the starting rotation here? The only thing that saved Lackey from really getting panned is how bad some of the other recent performances have been:

Lackey tonight: 6IP, 8H, 6R, 3BB, 6K
Buchholz Saturday: 5IP, 9H 6R, 5BB, 1K
Beckett Friday: 5.1IP, 9H, 9R, 3BB, 8K

that and the fact that Brandon Morrow (fresh off being picked up by yours truly in both of my fantasy leagues, just send my Fantasy GM of the Year award to my PO Box), was even worse.

At what point should John Farrell start to worry about his job security?

On the bright side, at least our old, maybe-should-retire DH isn't sleeping on the job like some of his peers.

Then again, I haven't heard the Seattle Mayor say anything along the lines of "remember when Jack Sikma doubled down the line to drive in Griffey in 95?!?"

Sunday, May 9, 2010

Game 32 - Red Sox v. Yankees (@Fenway)

At the risk of using a dumb superstition, maybe it's me.

Since the game was on ESPN tonight, I settled in at 5 to start watching (it's been 4 years since we moved out here and it's still a little strange for me to watch sports earlier in the day than God intended, but I'm getting there). We (my kids and wife were into it too, after an exciting end to the Celtics game earlier that led into some good bug hunting in the back yard afterwards) watched the first inning and a half. It was around then that realized that we didn't really have anything good to make for dinner, so combine that with it being Mother's day and my daughter already asking about eating out earlier so we went out to pizza to celebrate, on our way out the door it was 1-0.

After we got to the restaurant and ordered, I broke out my phone to check the score and lo and behold, it was now 6-0, and Lester hadn't allowed a hit yet. But no sooner had I hit refresh on my browser a couple of times (I still use the mobile browser even though I have a better app for this stuff, old habits die hard), that the no-hitter was gone, but so was the shutout thanks to a Nick Swisher home run. I hit refresh another time and POW, an ARod home run had made it 6-2. I quickly shoved my phone back into my pocket before Robinson Cano hit a 5-run homer to give the Yankees the lead. While I was eating my salad, my son blurts out 'whats the score', which my wife got a kick out of because he wasn't really using good manners, something both he and his sister are working on, but also because she felt thats what I got for exposing them to so much sports. Funny thing was, his tone totally resonated with me so I shot back with 'after I eat my salad' and we were done, until I had in fact, finished my salad. I sheepishly took the phone out and hit refresh, and it was now 9-2, all was well en route to a much needed win to end the series.

I'm in no way excited, but maybe, just maybe if I don't follow the next few games as closely as I have been, there will be a string of wins ahead (oh and by the way, great start by Jon Lester and I AM still being hopeful about David Ortiz turning it around...and I'd write more but ironically enough, I got a trade offer to acquire Dallas Braden in one of my fantasy leagues, so I better tend to that before the offer gets pulled of the table!)

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Game 31 - Red Sox v. Yankees (@Fenway)

I read a quote from Mitch Williams today (Mitch had picked the Red Sox to win the division) where he basically said 'you can't win the division in April, but you can lose it, and based on their start, the Red Sox are done'. Call me overly loyal, but even after last night's drubbing and overall mediocre performance to date, I thought it was a bit much to say they're done with so much baseball left to play, but I am inching closer to that realization after today's loss.

I won't even bother with the analysis of Clay's start, he sucked, the offense sucked, the bullpen sucked and the defense sucked. Since the game was on Fox, I got to tune in to see CC Sabathia, despite not having his best stuff or control, keep the Red Sox in check while at the same time, pitcher after pitcher (started with Buchholz, through Schoenweiss and Bard), left meatball after meatball out over the plate. It got so bad that even Tim McCarver realized it (he made a dead on observation about a poor pitch from Buchholz to Mark Teixeira that led to Tex' first home run of the game).

What's most staggering (to me at least) about the Red Sox this year is their team stats and relative positions in the league:

Runs scored: 6th in all of MLB
Runs allowed: 3rd worst in all of MLB

So basically, the team has performed exactly opposite to what everyone (possibly including their own management thought. How does a team with what seems to be a great pitching staff, get such horrid pitching performances over the course of the first 30+ games? Let me try some analysis (disclaimer, I'm typing this as I research it so who knows if this will lead anywhere). Pitching is about keeping the other team from scoring, and the other team scores by getting men on base, so how have the Red Sox pitchers done in keeping guys off the bases:


Opponents AVG:
.263 (17th in MLB)
Opponents OBP: .336 (18th in MLB)
Opponents SLG: .766 (23rd in MLB)

While none of those numbers (or their ranks) are good, they also don't imply that the staff would be the 3rd worst in all of MLB at preventing runs. So that leads me to think it's either poor defense, or just really poor pitching 'when it matters' (i.e. with runners in scoring position, or giving up loads of home runs...or worse, both). So let's take a look at that data:

Team defense: I'm not familiar enough with defensive stats to know if there are a set of great indicators for team defense, but I did just spend a few minutes looking at where Boston sits relative to other teams in the AL with respect to the team defense stats reported on baseball-reference.com, and I don't see anything that shows the Red Sox being in the basement defensively (certainly not bad enough to drag down an average pitching staff).

When-it-matters pitching: Boston is 8th in MLB in home runs allowed and 6th in MLB in total baserunners allowed, so while they're slightly below the middle of the pack when it comes to putting guys on base, they are much worse than the field in giving up multiple bases per hitter. Unfortunately I can't seem to find a site that has "opponents average with runners in scoring position", which at this point would seem to be a rather telling stat.

At this point, I'm left to conclude that it's mostly the pitching (which the stats bear out), and that it's probably a lack of clutch pitching that is the driver of the godawful start.

Lets hope the Celtics + Bruins grab a couple of wins over the next two days to give us something else to think about.

Friday, May 7, 2010

Game 30 - Red Sox v Yankees (@Fenway)


...and this is what I thought might happen. I was hesitant to get excited after the sweep of the Angels because lets face it, the Angels aren't setting the world on fire so the real test was going to be again the Yankees, and while it's only game 1 of the series, it's a tough loss when you've got your nominal #1 starter (emphasis on nominal) going against the other team's nominal #5 starter (again, emphasis on nominal). I hope there's something physically wrong with Beckett, because this was an absolute stinker of a start that saw his ERA skyrocket to 7.46 for the season, that's AWFUL (which is saying something for a guy that had already given up 7+ ER in two out of 6 starts on the season).

I'm not even going to bother discussing the game anymore since talking sports would also remind me of how terrible the Celtics were (I guess LeBron's elbow is ok after all) or how the Bruins lost in overtime...for all the hype over Boston's big sports night, best let it go.

I did see Iron Man 2 this morning though and since I do have a rating system, I figured I'd dust it off and put it to good use. Overall, IM2 wasn't nearly as good as the first one, partly because they screwed up with Mickey Roarke as the villain. He had great potential, but his character was just kinda lame, and what's with the jump rope weapon ('look out Iron Man, I'm going to double-dutch you to death!'). The other big flaw was the attempt to make Tony Stark more 'human' with the storyline about how that thing in his chest is affecting his health. Sorry guys, but what made Robert Downey Jr + Tony Start so great in the first movie was that he was a balls out playboy, rich with tons of women around him and smart enough to build robot suits in his basement, what else could you want? Adding the human element stripped that away a little and made the movie less entertaining (at least it did for me). On the plus side, Scarlett Johansson looked H-O-T, especially in that tight black jumpsuit thingy, rrrrraarrrrrrrrrr. But even that came at a cost as her appearance made Gwyneth Paltrow look, well, old. I've never been a big Gwyneth fan, but thought she looked good in the first movie, but the combination of a couple of years later and Scarlet in a tight jumpsuit was too much for her this time around. Enough with the babe analysis, on to the review:

Dumb (0-3 stooges): ok, so here's a flaw with my rating system...I'd actually rate this as pretty dumb, but not in a good way. I'm going to give it 1 stooge, and it's a Larry...not sure exactly what that means but it seems to fit.

Funny (0-10 LOLs): urgh, another flaw. Didn't I realize that I don't just see comedies, what was I thinking? I think I laughed once (probably at the Larry Ellison cameo), so I'll give it 1 LOL.

Length (1.5-2hrs): I think IM2 was in at just around 2hrs, which puts it at the outer limit of what I can generally tolerate.

So yeah, overall it wasn't that good, and I just realized how flawed my review system is...another thing to be pissed about today!

Thursday, May 6, 2010

Game 29 - Red Sox v. Angels (@Fenway)

Ok, so yeah, I am getting a little more intrigued in this team after a 4 game sweep of the Angels, but I'm holding out on actual optimism until after this weekend against the Yankees, mostly because the Angels are sliding so while sweeping a team that's down is what a good team should be doing, it doesn't exactly prove to me that the Sox are for real just yet. Taking 2 out of 3 against the Yankees this weekend would do that.

On a completely unrelated note (if you're heard to read baseball, you can stop reading, I'm about to go on a work-related rant)...I had one of those 'what the f' moments today at work while trying to do some testing on an upcoming release of my team's software. While trying to use the internal version of our site, I was experiencing just ridiculous slow downs, to the point where I couldn't tell if there were actual bugs v. just slow network connectivity internally. It got so bad that I basically had to stop and wander around, asking my team if they too were seeing similar issues. I got the usual recommendations like 'change your proxy' which is a reasonable thing to suggest, but for some reason today, just flipped my 'what the f' bit and I went on a rant about how ludicrous it is that this kind of stuff is still a problem these days, especially at large corporations that have resources to build great infrastructure for their teams, but don't (or at least sure feel like they don't). I suppose there's a bottom line somewhere that has to be met, but since my employer is certainly very profitable, it doesn't seem that our bottleneck is a lack of resources, but rather a lack of good investment (at least from this engineer's view) of those resources. Of course it didn't help that earlier in the week I spoke with someone who was interested in a coding job on my team, and the guy was just awful, couldn't even get through the basics of my standby C++ question, and yet he's got a job at my company, urgh.

Speaking of wastes of corporate resources, I love this device:

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Game 28 - Red Sox v. Angels (@Fenway)



Nomah!!!!!

I really like the fact that the Red Sox have been able to patch up the whole Nomar thing. The way things ended in 2004 always left a bad taste in my mouth, not just because of the trade, but mostly because of the connections people tried to draw between his departure and the eventual World Championship that year. Sure I've heard all kinds of stuff about how he was difficult and hornery, but he was a hell of a player for them for many years and I always felt like he got the shaft after he left, so good for him.

As for the game today, another positive step forward with a prototypical game that had good pitching and defense and enough offense to get a W. And of course it was heartening to see Papi's line for the night with a couple of hits, including an opposite field home run. His home run was about the only good news I had on my drive home, as 405 was a parking lot and even the surface roads were abysmal, so my usually 15min drive. Good thing I have a smartphone now so I can get scores when I'm stuck, since it's either that or listen to the local sports guys try and talk hockey (seems that the Canucks are getting way more attention around here this year than in years past, no doubt due to people trying to forget the Sonics).

Let's try and get a sweep tomorrow so we're on a roll for the Yankees!

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Game 27 - Red Sox v. Angels (@Fenway)

Several good things about tonights 5-1 win over the Angels, in no particular order:

(1) Another good start from Lester, seems to be coming out of his early-season funk as he's gone 15 innings in his last 2 starts combined with 1 ER and 16 K's

(2) Good defense, Scutaro made a heck of a play on the grounder from Morales (ironically this pushed across the only Angels run) and saw another nice place on the double play by Pedroia in the 8th against Abreu.

(3) Clutch hitting (at least in he 8th), granted it looked to me like Rivera misplayed Hermida's fly ball into a double, but we'll take it, and another double by Lowell to make it 5-1 was good to see.

On the downside Papi just looks terrible. While it's possible I've only seen his worst at bats given the small sample size of clips that I get to see, the stats are bearing out that he's just dreadful right now. Time to give up? No, but Lowell should be starting at DH at least 4x a week if you ask me.

Now if someone (yes I'm looking at you Mariners) could beat the Rays in a series, we might start to climb into this thing.

By the way, I really enjoyed the latest from Chad Finn on Boston.com, great way to summarize the sentiments of all Red Sox fans when it comes to the Rivera/Jeter/Posada/Pettite quartet.

Monday, May 3, 2010

Game 26 - Red Sox v. Angels (@Fenway)

Call me cynical (I am a Red Sox fan afterall), but while tonight's game was an obvious improvement over what we saw in Baltimore, I'm not buying in yet. Why? Well for one, Joe Saunders has been pretty horrible so far this year, so while clubbing him is the thing that good teams should do, it's not exactly a major accomplishment either. Also, while Clay did get the W (good for my fantasy league team too!), he slipped back a bit on his strike efficiency (I'm really starting to like this stat to evaluate his starts). For the night, only 0.596% of his pitches went for strikes, which is below that 0.6ish number that is looking increasingly like the mark he needs to hit to have a good start (his other numbers for the night were 5 2/3IP, 8H 4ER 3BB and only 2K).

And what's the deal with Adrian Beltre, who committed his 6th error of the season tonight? Living in Seattle I saw a little of Beltre over the last few years (not that I'm anti-Mariners or anything, but they're broadcasting crew is just lame, especially Dave Sims, the guy is just a rah rah knucklehead if you ask me, not that you did of course), and while what little I saw was good defense, I never saw the kind of stand out defense that we all heard about after he signed with the Red Sox.

But don't listen to me, here's espn's resident knucklehead with his deep analysis (they need to pitch better, hit better and field better):

Tim Kurkjian on what the Red Sox need to do.

Uh, thanks Tim.

Sunday, May 2, 2010

Game 25 - Red Sox v. Orioles (@Camden)

Ouch (5-4 loss in 10 innings on Friday)
Ouch (12-9 loss on Saturday)
Ouch (3-2 loss in 10 innings on Sunday)

Bleh. Ok, you get the gist...I'm not feeling so hot about what happened over the last three days. It's bad enough to get swept for the second time this year, and losing the fourth series (out of 8), but its just compounded by the fact that it was (a) against the Orioles and (b) lost with our best reliever in the game after the guy that is nominally the best starter on the staff started the game.

So much for the hopes of a 5-1 road trip and getting back to respectability (not to mention over .500), the Red Sox are now 7 games behind the streaking Tampa Bay Rays, there are only two teams further out of first place in their respective divisions right now:

Baltimore (11 GB)
Houston (8.5 GB)

Hopefully we don't see the Orioles passing us on the way down. Even worse (and yes I am piling on now) the Red Sox are the only team that is overachieving in the AL East now (at least according to the Expected Win/Loss stats that espn.com keeps which uses Bill James' Pythagorean Expectation formula to calculate how many wins and losses a team should have based off of runs scored and runs allowed. While not quite as disasterous as Krispy Kreme's attempt to invade New England (and take on the 800 LB gorilla known as Dunkin' Donuts), this start is making feel about as down as I did after I ate my first Krispy Kreme.



Lots of hype, and disappointing taste.

Saturday, May 1, 2010

Game 24 - Red Sox v. Orioles (@Camden)

Ouch, this one hurt a little for a few reasons. They fell two games under .500 and lost a chance at going 5-1 (which is what I was hoping for when the road trip started), and seemed very achievable after the sweep in Toronto and heading into Baltimore to play a floundering Orioles team. Also painful in that Dice-K got shelled (10 baserunners and 6 earned runs in 4 2/3 innings). Judging by the box score and pitch count, it sounds like he was his typical, annoying, nibbling self instead of attacking hitters. About the only good thing (from a Red Sox perspective) that came out of this game was Ortiz hitting 2 HR, one of them off left handed reliever Alberto Castillo, lets hope this turns into the start of a bit of a hot streak for Papi.

Papi has more HR than he did at the same point in the season as last year, but has fewer RBI (possibly from hitting a little lower, and just fewer chances as he's only had 56 AB this April versus 87 AB last April. His OBP + AVG are also down year over year, but his SLG is up (with a huge boost from tonight's performance). His K/AB ratio is up:

2009 (through April): 0.252
2010 (through April): 0.375

None of these are making me feel particularly optimistic about him turning it around, but given that he did turn it around in the summer last year and he's earned some slack because of his history with the team, it will be a wait and see situation for at least another month IMO.

Friday, April 30, 2010

Game 23 - Red Sox v. Orioles (@Camden)

Another strong start from a Red Sox starter. Over their last 3 games, the starters have gone 22 innings and only given up 3 ER, so thankfully, the rotation appears to be turning into what we had expected coming out of spring training (doubly so once Beckett gets himself straightened out. Biggest issue that I see right now is the bullpen and lack of consistency. There are nights where Bard/Papelbon and one of Okajima/Ramirez/Delcarmen are lights out, but there have been too many times early in the season where these guys have given up leads.

After typing that I went and poked around on mlb.com, espn.com and fangraphs.com to see if there were any well established (and already calculated) stats that help analyze reliever effectiveness. Not surprisingly, neither mlb.com nor espn.com had anything, but fangraphs.com does have something called "WPA Relievers", for a good definition and example, using Jacoby Ellsbury no less, check out this page. Basically they take all kinds of factors into account (score, point in the game, contribution to winning/losing) and then add that up to get a players WPA, it can apply to any player but the nice thing about fangraphs is that they have a view that allows you to see it for just relievers. As of this writing, Papelbon and Bard were in the top 6 in the majors, with the rest of the pen in the negative and Okajima being he worst of the current guys. Interesting to see that worst in the majors are some pretty notable names (in reverse order from last)

Trevor Hoffman
Frank Francisco
Mike Gonzalez
Chris Perez

All of whom are (last time I checked), closers for their respective teams.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Game 22 - Red Sox v. Blue Jays (@SkyDome)

Now that's what I'm talking about. I caught the score while sitting in traffic on 405 south today, saw it was 1-0 in the 7th and Lester pitching well, very good to see him rounding into form (both for the Sox and for my fantasy league team which has now seen back-to-back strong starts from Buchholz and Lester). Watching the clips on mlb.com just now, I saw 4 very good pitches from Lester, changeups and sliders early, 95 mph fastballs in the middle and some good curve balls towards the end. No wonder the Jays only had one hit off of him.

Almost as good as Lester, was the performances from Bard (1IP and 3K) and Papelbon (a clean 9th with 1K), exactly the way we had hoped the Red Sox would be winning games this year. Lester's performance shouldn't come as a total surprise since he's done well against Toronto over the last 3 years (3.03 ERA with an opponents batting average of only .205), but yes, good to see.

And hey, look at that, we're back at .500 (11-11) on the season now!

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Game 21 - Red Sox v. Blue Jays (@SkyDome)

Seems that I might be onto something with Buchholz and the throwing strikes analysis I did in a previous post. In tonight's game he had a 0.683 strikes/pitches ratio, his second best number since the start of 2009, and tonight's game was a gem. I'm sure that my picking up Lyle Overbay (who had a big game yesterday) had something to do with it too (jinxed myself!), but nonetheless another strong start from the team's #5 starter (he's actually pitching like the #1 right now).

Something I had meant to write about yesterday, but didn't get to in my hard hitting analysis of Francona's umpire argument style was what a dump the SkyDome looks like these days. Watching the highlights, actually reminds me a bit of watching the Sox play at the old Exhibition Stadium. Watching these highlights from yesterday and tonight, I'm half expecting to hear Ned Martin and Bob Montgomery doing a promo for 'Ask the Manager' on channel 38 in between innings...gripping stuff.

Monday, April 26, 2010

Game 20 - Red Sox v. Blue Jays (@SkyDome)

Yikes, that was an ugly game (not only for the Red Sox, but both of my fantasy league teams too, which had Beckett starting today). Definitely glad to see them score a bunch of runs, but what's the deal with the pitching, especially Beckett? He now has a 7.22 ERA for the month, exactly what he had last year at the end of April, but still ridiculously high for a guy that is supposed to be the ace of the staff and just signed a long term deal. As I've said numerous times already, it's too early to panic, but c'mon!

While watching the highlights of tonight's game I watched the clip of Youkilis being called out at home, and Francona's argument with the home plate ump (who seemed to have blown the call). I noticed Francona doing his finger pointing thing and started wondering if he has a standard rap he lays on umps when he goes out to argue (at least to warm them up). Maybe it's just me but it looks like he's saying something like 'ok, that's one bad call tonight, that better be the last one' (that's the G rated version by the way). It would be pretty funny if he said the same thing everytime, and the umps know its coming so they just tune him out until he's done, then let him walk away and back to the game.

On the field, some strong stuff from Delcarmen, Bard and Papelbon (5 scoreless innings), and big games at the plate from Scutaro, Varitek and Beltre. While Lyle Overbay (who I KNEW was going to heat up, yet didn't pick him up in my fantasy league last night for unknown reasons) had a huge night too. Reason I was expecting Overbay to have a good run was that his average was down around the .150 range and he's just better than that (not much, but better) so figured he'd have a hot streak coming. Let's hope that same theory holds for JJ Hardy (who yes, is on both of my teams :) )

Sunday, April 25, 2010

Game 19 - Red Sox v. Orioles (@Fenway)

A sweep against the Orioles would have been nice, but winning 2 out of three (and 4 out of their last 6) at least gives hope that the slide we saw a week ago is coming to an end. Also on the 'good news' side is the upcoming road trip has trips to Toronto and Baltimore, teams that the Red Sox should be beating. If they can manage to go 4-2 over the next 6 that would put then at 12-13, so let's home for a 5-1 road trip that puts them over the .500 mark (hopefully the last time they cross that this year!)

It's also encouraging that I'm actually looking forward to checking the scores again. I was at the park with my family today, chasing my son on his bike and in between shouts of 'look out!' and cringing as he was headed towards a trash can, I found a few spare minutes to check in on the game. This is a big departure from a week ago when the Sox games were more upsetting to me, than hills are to my daughter on her bike.

On a semi-related note, I caught the end of the Celtics/Heat game today, having seen the scores over the past 2 games and wanting to see if the Celtics did indeed have the look of a champion (as at least some of my friends have described them). Well hard to say they're championship caliber when they miss easy opportunities in the last 2 minutes to score 7 points (3 missed free throws by Ray Allen, 2 missed free throws by Garnett and Rondo missing a total gimme layup). Let's hope the Celtics close it out in 5 so they get some downtime before round two.

Saturday, April 24, 2010

Game 18 - Red Sox v. Orioles (@Fenway)

Boy did I pick the perfect time to go out to dinner tonight. I had the ESPN Gamecast up during the 6th and top half of the 7th before we left for the local Mexican restaurant, things weren't looking so good so I didn't even bother checking the score when we got there (I found a good score app for my Blackberry earlier in the day, gives me scores across sports in a single app, updated in real-time, and best of all it's free).

Anyways back to the game, Scutaro's 3 run homer in the 7th looked very close to being touched by a fan in the monster seats to me. I only saw one replay of it so hard to say with any certainty, but it was close. Varitek continues to amaze, 4 HR already when only playing part time? I'm trying not to get too excited by this since it's so early, but it would be a great development for the Sox if Varitek could really shine in the backup role. It would give them more flexibility for the DH role to wait out Papi's struggles as well give them a defensive upgrade behind the plate more often than they were expecting. I know Varitek wasn't necessarily great at preventing opponents' baserunning, but can't be much worse than Martinez (who has only caught 7% of runners this year, and 14% last year between Boston + Cleveland), and we all know how much pitchers like to throw to Varitek.

I actually found it interesting that Martinez has put up some pretty 'caught stealing %' good numbers over the years, in 2008 he caught 37% of runners and in 2007 the number was 32%. It's entirely possible that Martinez is suffering from the Red Sox pitching philosophy, which has always been to focus on the man at the plate at the cost of the baserunner, but I know there's always been some talk about Martinez being a bit of a defensive liability at catcher (talk that's backed up by baseball-reference.com's defensive stats on Victor), but apparently its less about baserunning and more about the other facets of catching.

Friday, April 23, 2010

Game 17 - Red Sox v. Orioles (@Fenway)

It's always good when Baltimore comes to town, and it's even better when Papi gets his first home run of the season and it's still April.

Lester clearly wasn't super sharp, but compared to the messy start he's had, this was a good outing. High pitch count (113 pitches in less than 6 full innings), and too many baserunners (8 via 4 hits and 4 walks). The walks stand out the most since Baltimore isn't exactly a patient lineup, they're the 4th worst team in the major at drawing walks. But all in all, Lester gave them a chance to win which is what's important and hopefully this start helps him turnaround the dreadful start. Especially since he's on one of my fantasy league teams and I need some starting pitching to come around next week!

One thing I noticed while watching highlights and live look-ins on MLB Network tonight (how did I ever survive without a 24hr baseball channel?), seemed that lots of teams were going with the dark jerseys tonight. I guess I'm a traditionalist, but I'm not a fan of all the alternate/special stuff. It doesn't bother me as much when I see teams like the A's wearing black jerseys (they need any help they can get to make some money), but do the Red Sox really need to do it too? One of the few (maybe only?) things I've admired the Yankees for is their sticking to tradition with uniforms. I mean even in the 1970s, they still had pretty standard and traditional uniforms:



compared to the crummy stuff the Red Sox wore:



And speaking of bad taste, the Bing site today had a picture of a turtle on it, not exactly the right image to display next to your search box to give users a feeling that you've got a blazingly fast search engine. At least they give the turtle sunglasses and a cane.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Game 16 - Red Sox v. Rangers (@Fenway)

Wow, nice start from Buchholz tonight! I just watched the highlights on mlb.com and he had some nasty stuff, good slider, wicked curve and saw his fastball hit 97mph on at least one pitch. Clay now has a 2.70 ERA and 18 K's, good for top 20 in the AL pitching.

This kind of loss doesn't bother me nearly as much since it's "to form" with what the moves were in the offseason. They got great pitching tonight but for whatever reason (didn't see enough clips of Wilson to see if it was a case of good pitching or poor hitting), they didn't do much offensively. And when you consider Ellsbury and Cameron are out, this isn't so bad IMO.

Back to Buchholz. I've heard a common complaint is that he doesn't trust his stuff enough, not enough strikes. So I'll start keeping an eye on his 'strike percentage' per start (# of strikes/# of pitches), which for tonight is 0.67. To put the number into some context, that's his top ratio of his three starts this year and his ratio for all of 2009 was 0.615384615, with the following per-start breakdown:

Ratio (Strikes/Pitches) ERA
----------------------------
0.708860759 3.74
0.663043478 5.02
0.641509434 3.92
0.640776699 1.59
0.633027523 3.21
0.626168224 3.52
0.626168224 4.38
0.622222222 3.72
0.615384615 4.4
0.600000000 4.45
0.592105263 6.05
0.587628866 3.66
0.585714286 4.21
0.574468085 3.99
0.568421053 3.49
0.561904762 5.33

While there isn't a strong correlation between good strike/pitches ratios to good ERA's there is at least an indication that it's something worth keeping an eye on, given the relatively small sample size so far. I'll also try and get similar data at some point to see how much of a correlation there is with other pitchers too.

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Game 15 - Red Sox v. Rangers (@Fenway)

It sure is nice to play a team that is struggling as much as the Sox are. While there (once again) was plenty wrong with the performance tonight, its good to see a couple of wins strung together, especially since they were late/last at-bat ones.

Beckett's outing (7 IP and 7 ER) was ugly, not sure why he pitched the 7th? Not that Josh Hamilton is the same guy that made the All Star team and finished 7th in the AL MVP voting in 2008, but why not go to the bullpen once the tying run came to the plate and Beckett's pitch count was getting up to 100 or so pitches? It wasn't like he was lights out tonight (12 baserunners in 7 innings), and with guys in the pen pitching well over the last few days, seems like it was time to make a move.

That being said, very happy for Mike Lowell to get in the lineup and have a big impact. Maybe the combination of Lowell in the spring and Papi in the summer (if he can heat up like he did last year), can put up reasonable DH numbers this year. Speaking of Papi, I was getting some coffee in the kitchen at work the other day and a fellow New Englander and Sox fan was talking to another guy about baseball. The other guy made some comment about how Papi was washed up and I quickly blurted out something like 'oh yeah, well he hit 29 home runs with 99 RBI last year!'. The funny thing is, I have no idea how accurate those numbers are, but given the conviction with which I delivered my statement, nobody questioned me at all. It's one of the interesting things that I've noticed about living in Seattle...there's lots of nice people here, almost too nice. So nice that people rarely question things, and even when they do, it's done in a 'hmm, well maybe we should investigate a little more to see if thats correct' instead of saying 'wtf, are you kidding me? he only hit 28 home runs last year you dingbat!'

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Game 14 - Red Sox v. Rangers (@Fenway)


Yay!

Clearly Theo + the Trio are reading my blog since they put both Cameron and Ellsbury on the DL to make room for some real outfielders (sorry Bill Hall). And while I can't take the credit for the Darnell McDonald callup, I'll take credit for the DL moves that made space for McDonald.

And oh yeah, they won a game today to break out of that 5 game losing streak.

First the two-run home run in the 8th to tie it, then a blast to left with the bases loaded in the 9th to win it, well done Darnell, welcome to Red Sox lore (if they reel off a nice 8-2 streak over their next 10 for example).

On the downside, I almost drove off of 405 today on my way home trying to count how many steals the Rangers had racked up by the 5th. I kept squinting at the summary trying to decipher the actual count, surely Vlad Guerrero didn't have 2 steals in one game?!? Well he did indeed, and please don't call me Shirley.

Monday, April 19, 2010

Game 13 - Red Sox v. Rays (@Fenway)

On the bright side, 5 2/3 innings of shutout ball from the bullpen today.

On the not-so-bright side, everything else.

Great quote from Pedroia today ""When you don't show up, you're going to get beat," he said. "Doesn't matter if it's the Rays or (bleeping) Brookline High."

And that's exactly how it feels right now, they just aren't showing up. The short highlights I saw on mlb.com (which by the way is my preferred way to catch up on games since there aren't video ads to sit through, like on espn), just showed an utterly incompetent outfield of Hermida, Hall and Drew screwing up play after play, turning outs into singles, and singles into doubles. Yes, I know it's early, but management has to do something about the OF, there's no way you can let Bill Hall go out there again and embarass himself. It's time to (a) put someone, either Cameron or Ellsbury, on the DL so they can call up a legit OF to play center and (b) do something about the lineup. The latter is clearly harder because there just aren't many options given the short bench they're playing with, but I'd get Lowell in there somewhere (either 3B or DH) on a regular basis, not every day, just get him regular time, probably at Papi's expense. Hell, get Bob Zupcic out of retirement and give him a shot in center, it can't get much worse.

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Game 12 - Red Sox v. Rays (@Fenway)

I turned on the game around the 8th (it was on TBS, had checked in early, but had stuff to do around the house), and I saw the score was 7-0. My first thought was 'geez, I hope they at least have a hit'. It's that bad right now, I'm almost expecting them to be no-hit. Maybe it was the fact that it was Garza, who surpsingly is only 5-2 with a 3.23 ERA in his career against the Red Sox. Or maybe it was the even-more-anemic-than-expected offense (18th best in the majors in runs scored, despite being 6th best in OPS). Or maybe it was just that sinking feeling that comes when your team is in a bad rut. And they clearly are in a bad rut right now, falling to 4-8 and 5 GB of the first place Yankees and Rays.

While watching the 8th, my wife asked me 'so what's the deal, is their hitting bad or their pitching', to which I simply replied 'yes'. We all expected the hitting to be a weakness, but right now, they're the second worst team in baseball at drawing walks. That's a surprise since as a team they have a good OBP, and with hitters like Youkilis, Drew and Pedroia in the lineup, you'd expect to see a fair number of walks. On the pitching side, it's been a little bad luck (errors over the past few days as examples), but mostly just ineffectiveness as they have a team ERA of 4.65 which is 11/14 in the AL, not good for team built on pitching + defense.

It's obviously very early in the season and I think they'll be right in the thick of it at the end of the season, but this is getting hard to watch right now. Might actually be good to be on the other coast until the ship gets righted.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

Game 11 - Red Sox v. Rays (@Fenway)

Geez this is starting to get ugly. I know it's only 11 games into the season, but the Sox are losing games in unexpected ways (based on the offseason moves). After losing the previous game in extra innings, and the only reason it went extra innings was because of sloppy defense (first an error by Scutaro that allows Crawford to get on base, then a botched chopper by Beltre that allowed Crawford to score), they lose tonight due at least in part to a bad play by Cameron in center. Hmm, hold on a sec:

Error by Scutaro in Friday night's game
Bad play by Beltre in Friday night's game
Error by Cameron in Saturday night's game


Oh yeah, those are the three guys they signed to shore up the defense this year! I haven't actually seen the Cameron play yet, in the bottom of the 9th, the mlb.com Gameday feature went kerplunk and stopped updating after Pedroia's out, and it seems to still be stuck in that mode so I can't get to the wrapup for the video highlights. But in his last 266 games, Cameron only made 5 errors.

The bats came alive a bit in the 7th, I had the Gamecast going then and 'saw' Pedroia's and Youk's 2R homers, and really thought I had made the right choice to skip watching 'The Hurt Locker' with my wife, but then the rally fizzled in the 8th and 9th and the Sox go into Sunday's game at 4-7, already 4 GB behind the Yankees.

For the record, since she' still watching the movie (with generous use of fast forward), I'm at least feeling pretty good about skipping the movie, got my blog updated and some work stuff done (geeking out on UML diagrams in Visual Studio 2010), so it's not all bad.

And oh yeah, how about them Celtics!

Friday, April 16, 2010

Game 10 - Red Sox v. Rays (@Fenway)


Some good stuff from the first 8 1/2 innings of the game:

Really good: Beckett pitched very well against a good lineup.
Kinda good: Papi isn't the most pathetic hitter in the regular lineup (No matter what, I'll always have a soft spot for Ortiz over Drew for obvious reasons)
Shocking: The captain now has 3 HR in 7 AB this year for an eye popping 1.714 SLG percentage...that's insane! Should we be reading more into this, like if the Sox had a half decent backup catcher over the past 3 years, Varitek would still be an All Star caliber catcher?

I'll finish off the update on game 10 along with (hopefully) an update on Game 11 tomorrow too, but I hear Boston is in for lots of rain this weekend. Ironically, Seattle is sunny!

So much for the sunny optimism...3-1 loss in this game after the resumed it on Saturday. Has Delcarmen actually peaked? I've never been very high on him, so it's entirely possible that I'm just being premature, but c'mon, a 2 run homer to Pat Freaking Burrell? Burrell numbers in his time in Tampa (.221/.315/.367 and .185 /.267 /.259 AVG/OBP/SLG for 2009 and 2010 respectively) are downright Manny Alexander-esque. Although in Burrell's defense, nobody has found steroid syringes in his Mercedes.

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Game 9 - Red Sox v. Twins (@Target)

Yikes...was Liriano really that good today or did the Sox hitters just make him look like he never had Tommy John surgery? Most disconcerting thing from this start was the low number of walks given that Liriano walked 5 in 6 innings against the White Sox in his first start of the season, and this Sox lineup is built around being patient (save for new guys like Beltre and Cameron).

BTW, guys at mlb.com, your video player is broken. I just queued up the highlights from today's Red Sox game and hit pause so it would load up while I was taking care of something for work. When I came back and unpaused it, the player went ahead to (what I assume was) the next highlight of the Marlins game. Speaking of bugs, how about the three errors from the defense today? I give Bill Hall a pass on the ball he flubbed in center (although now that I look up his defensive stats, he actually played 130 games in CF for the Brewers in 2007). That being said, the errors weren't the problem today, just no hitting or patience (less than 100 pitches thrown by Liriano in 7 innings).

Hopefully the Sox were just eager to get home for this weekends' series against Tampa Bay...