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.
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