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 :)
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