Enough excuses: Red Sox simply aren’t good enough

Thursday, September 09, 2010

Mike Parente, GoLocalProv Sports Editor

They say pitching wins championships, unless your pitching completely stinks, at which point you blame a bunch of injuries for your inability to win because it’s much easier to do that than it is to point fingers at those who are actually playing and/or admit you were way off base on your projections to begin with.

Carve that into the tombstone of the 2010 Boston Red Sox, who are dying a slow, painful death due to what many in “The Nation” feel is piss-poor luck in the form of season-ending injuries to Kevin Youkilis, Jacoby Ellsbury, Mike Camerona and Dustin Pedroia.

Funny, because I was told at the beginning of the season that the Red Sox – despite downgrading offensively and focusing more on “run prevention” with their position players – would be better than the Yankees because they had a starting rotation filled with “aces” from top to bottom, including Josh Beckett, Jon Lester and the newly-acquired John Lackey.

According to Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA rankings (or what the nerds refer to as Player Empirical Comparison and Organizational Test Algorithm), the Yankees were supposed to finish third in the American League East behind Boston and Tampa Bay with only 14 more wins than the Orioles. PECOTA changes its mind every now and then, so the most up-to-date rankings released before the start of the season put the Red Sox on top in the division race by a whisker. Once again, the Yankees were bridesmaids because they didn’t have a staff full of “aces” like Boston did.

PECOTA hit the nail on the head when it came to New York’s rotation, which, as we’ve learned in recent months, is absolute compost outside of C.C. Sabathia and Andy Pettite, but the stat geeks responsible for all these “algorithms” failed to account for how lousy Boston’s pitching staff has been this season.

You can blame injuries all you want, but the truth is Beckett, Lackey, Daisuke Matsuzaka, Hideki Okajima, Tim Wakefield and, to some degree, closer Jonathan Papelbon have been brutal. Pick anyone from that pitching staff outside of Lester, Clay Buccholz or Daniel Bard, and chances are they’ve been horrendous.

As for the “run prevention” nonsense the Red Sox shoved in our faces all winter, that’s been a monumental crock of you-know-what. I hate to appease the nerds, but in looking at UZR ratings (otherwise known as the ultimate zone rating, which calculates how many runs above or below average a fielder is based on how well he gets to balls hit in his vicinity and how many errors he commits), the Red Sox rank among the middle of the pack defensively and aren’t much better than they were a year ago; their current UZR of 6.5 is just a shade higher than last year’s 5.6.

What we have here is a team built to pitch and defend exceptionally well that hasn’t done either, yet in a glimmering example of ass-backwards logic, the fans, media, players, etc., have chosen to use injuries as a convenient excuse for what has turned into a lost season.

No one would dare underscore the loss of Pedroia or Youkilis (Ellsbury sported a .241 on-base percentage in his 18 games this year, so let’s not overstate his importance to the lineup, and Cameron has been an unmitigated disaster), but shouldn’t the blame be placed on the indefensible pitching of Beckett, Lackey, and others when that was supposed to be what put the Red Sox over the top in the first place?

Beckett’s ERA is 5.91. The league average is 4.12. Lackey’s 4.48 ERA is actually respectable by comparison, but he’s second in the league in hits allowed (205) and his 1.48 WHIP is the highest of his career and his highest since 2003. Overall, the Red Sox rank 21st in league ERA, whereas their offense is still ranked second in the league in runs scored despite a horrific slide in which they’ve been hovering around 18th since the All-Star break.

On average, the Red Sox can score enough runs to win (five runs should be plenty with competent pitching), but it’s hard to combat Papelbon pissing away games in the bottom of the ninth or Beckett getting shelled on a consistent basis. Boston sat 6 ½ games behind Tampa for a playoff spot on the eve of the July 31 trade deadline, prompting the front office to stand pat and hope for the best. On Aug. 27, they were 4 ½ out after beating Tampa at home in the first of a three-game series, and they led the second game heading into the eighth inning before coughing it up in grand fashion, not because of injuries but because of sloppy defense and questionable calls by manager Terry Francona.

Great teams overcome injuries and win despite the obstacles in front of them. The pretenders point fingers everywhere except at themselves.

Everyone on the Boston bandwagon swore this pitching staff could carry the Red Sox back to the World Series. They were wrong, so let’s call it like it is and quit making excuses.