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.

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 :)

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:

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)

Game 48 - Red Sox v. Rays (@Tropicana)

Do I really need to say more? :)

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...

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 :)