Looking Forward to 2008: Boston Red Sox

The last day he was conscious—June 15th—I showed him the sports page. His fingers flickered over the standings and he made out that the Red Sox were running away with things in the AL East. He smiled.

Only a few moments later, he lapsed into a coma.

The Red Sox kept things together well enough after a very fast start, coasted into the playoffs, and found their second wind, bringing off a virtual replica of their 2004 post-season.

Much of this was accomplished by an approach that might be the one distinguishing “old” sabermetrics from “new” sabermetrics—assuming, of course, that there’s any way to know if such a distinction, in fact, actually exists.

Whatever the case, the Red Sox shaved off nearly 170 runs from their opponents in 2007, much of that difference occurring in two key innings:

In these pages last year, it was suggested that the Sox would need to fix their setup relief problems that had plagued them in ’06.

They did that. Especially in the seventh inning, led by Hideki Okajima (.089 Opp BA, .232 Opp OPS). That last number is not a misprint.

Two other pitchers who transformed themselves in the seventh inning: Josh Beckett (.823 OPS in 2006; .527 OPS in ’07) and Manny Delcarmen (.340 BA, .774 OPS in ’06; .175 BA, .548 OPS in 2007).

Dropping another forty runs allowed from the eighth and the ninth innings completed the key team transformation.

The starters were responsible for giving less ground in the second inning—the one with the lowest runs scored aside from the ninth—which is something that had sabotaged the ’06 staff.

The numbers:

Though Sox starters gave more ground in the middle innings than in ’06, their advantage in Innings 1-3 (80 fewer runs allowed) gave the team greater control early in the game.

This was especially prevalent early in the year, when the Sox jumped out to a 36-16 start by the end of May.

This allowed them to coast home with a division crown despite having the fifth worst June-to-end WPCT of any division/pennant winner with a .667+ WPCT over the first 52 games of the season (60-50, .545). The 1983 Dodgers and the 1971 Giants are the only teams (out of a total of 83) to go from such a start to a sub-.500 final two-thirds of the season.

(While it’s become harder to sustain a fast start in the era of divisions—teams that have finished first in the “divisional era” (1969- ) play .592 ball from game 53 on, versus .638 for the winners during the pre-division era—the Red Sox were not a good finishing team at all in ’07.

Until they came back from that 1-3 deficit to the Tribe, of course.)

It’s also true that World Series champs in recent times have coasted more down the stretch during the regular season. World champs have played a bit better than their season-to-date records over the final 30 games of the season—about 3% higher, on average, from 1903-93.

Since 1995, however, World Series winners have played more than 5% worse than their season-to-date record over the last 30 games of the regular season.

And teams at either end of this spectrum—teams that ramp up their tail-end performance (20% improvement or more) and those that do some serious coasting (at least a 12% decline) turn out to be at greater risk of not winning pennants/divisions in the next season.

Ten of the fifteen WS winners with “big finishes” were also-rans the following year; thirteen of eighteen WS winners who “coasted in the homestretch” came up short in the next season.

That’s a 30% “repeat rate”—versus a 45% repeat rate for teams who show less extreme late-season performance fluctuations.

Where were the 2007 Red Sox in this formulation? Sitting right at that 12% decline rate.

Yes, it’s but one indicator, it’s a small sample size of teams (103), and it’s only a likelihood dropoff of 33%. But it’s something you haven’t seen before, so there it is for you to file away or forget.

The other area where the Sox rebounded in ’07 was in their road performance against “bad” (sub-.500) teams. These “quality of opposition” breakouts—pioneered by the still-proudly uncircled wagons at BBBA, and known by those who refuse to think they know better as “GvB”—have some interesting (and stubbornly pervasive) splits within them.

One of these is “road performance against bad teams.” The AL has shown a particularly good separation between playoff teams and also-rans in this GvB split over the past eight seasons (2000-07). Playoff teams have posted a .618 WPCT (838-537) over bad teams while away from home in that time frame, while those out of the money have played under .500 ball (to be exact, .486, or 1420-1499).

Of 32 AL playoff teams in the past eight years, only two—the 2005 Red Sox (24-25) and the 2007 Angels (23-24)— played under .500 in this split.

The ’06 Red Sox were also under .500 in this split (19-21, losing 14 of their last 18 games against bad teams on the road).

But when things got a bit tight in late August (the division lead having dwindled to just four games), the Red Sox won six of seven road games against bad teams, including four straight blowouts against the White Sox (11-3, 10-1, 14-2, 11-1).

This gave them a cushion that permitted them to get swept in a three-game series at Yankee Stadium (the beginning of that 16-14 “coasting down the stretch”).

All in all, the Sox were 25-13 against bad teams on the road in ’07. Keep an eye on that split in ’08 and you’ll have a quick gauge of how they are really faring in the race. Real playoff teams take out bad teams in the bad team’s ballpark.

***

OK, enough arcana. (And crankily antiquated arcana at that—just doesn’t feel right these days to not get reamed by a VORP™ strap-on, but trust me, all that rectal bleeding is a pain in the ass.) What about the Sox in ’08? They stayed almost pat, apparently deciding that the moves they weren’t able to make in ’07 (dumping Mike Lowell) were part of a design that is the residue of pendular (as opposed to pendulous, which—as any pornographic blonde will tell you—is something else entirely…) good fortune.

Epstein-James can’t really expect the pitchers to hold that level of performance again in 2008, but they probably figure that they will get a boost from Manny’s desire to cash in his big 2009 option year and that J.D. Drew might be healthy enough to offset any downturn from Lowell and Pedroia plus a rougher-than-expected transition for Jacoby Ellsbury than is soothsaid by the Sons of Sam. (Say that sentence after four consecutive shots, and see how many seashells by the seashore you can heave back into your local landfill…)

Of course, diehard skeptics would like to know if there is anything resembling science in the Sox’ snap-up of the “mighty” Sean Casey, or whether this is simply a tease for the random serendipity of the marketplace. My own take was that the Sox’ celestial duo figured that Casey might find lightning in a bottle should he have to fill in for Ortiz if Big Papi goes “pop” at some point this season. (This is a clear case of the “John Freakin’ Mabry Stratagem”—the one-handed clapping that sabermetricians hear when their exasperated loved ones heave them from a speeding car, and deposit them in one of those increasingly endangered old-growth forests.)

There is still a hole at SS, and Captain Varitek is likely to be further out to sea this time around, so there will be some leakage in the lineup still. We remain far removed from the offensive geyser that Epstein-James concocted in ’03 and ‘04.

The Sox also need to see if they can introduce Kevin Youkilis to the concept of conditioning, as he continues to be ground down by the long season (.880 OPS in the first half, .735 in the second). They may feel that Kev earned all that extra souvlaki by virtue of his big step-up in the ALCS, but things figure to be tighter for the Sox in ’08 and they just might need some of that production in August and September this time around.

Keeping Coco Crisp would fit in with the “stay the course” mantra that currently makes Fenway into a sister city for Falloujah. Manny and J.D. remain fragile, and Ellsbury should not go out there without a net—not just yet, anyway.

All in all, the Sox should be midway between their ’06 and ’07 run levels this year.

The question then becomes how much slippage will occur on the mound. Their net gain in that second inning from ’06 to ’07 was 55 runs—they went from 25 runs worse than average to 30 runs better than average in the inning. That’s a dramatic shift over a single year, and it’s awfully hard to think that they will duplicate such results in ’08.

The gain in bullpen ERA (3.10 in ’07 vs. 4.51 in ’06) also is probably not sustainable. Okajima and Delcarmen are the likeliest to give ground. Manny’s .053 Opp BA on full count pitches was mind-blowing, all right, but living that well in such an elevated run-scoring count is an illusion at best. It’s also not likely that the Sox relievers can snuff out the first batter they face with success similar to what they achieved in ’07 (.203 BA, .584 OPS). This is another area where my man Manny had outrageous success in ’07 (5-for-40).

From the back of my envelope, I’m figuring that the Sox will give back somewhere between six to seventh-tenths on that ‘07 bullpen ERA in ’08. That works out to a little more than 30 runs for the year. Most of this will come in the seventh inning, but the Sox starters will probably give back about the same amount in the second inning.

Overall, given the likelihood of some amount of struggle from the back end of the Sox rotation (Lester, Buchholz and Colon), Boston will most likely find that the runs allowed slippage in ’08 will be about 80 runs. They’ll probably stabilize their offense at around 20 runs below last year, balancing out gains from Drew and Manny, Julio Lugo and maybe Youkilis, some slippage from Ortiz, Lowell, Pedroia, and Varitek, and some kind of less-than-optimum mish-mash from Ellsbury and Crisp.

That would bring them in at around the 91 wins tossed out here as the projection for ’07. They’ll need the Yanks to have a real crisis on the mound and exploit their matchup against them as they did in ’04 and ‘05, plus find a way to handle an improving Blue Jay pitching staff. Almost half of their 30-games-above-.500 record in ’07 came from their performance against the O’s and the Rays (25-11 combined). They can’t let that slip.

And Josh Beckett needs to dominate the early innings again as he did last year. Beckett allowed 40 runs in the first two innings in ’06; last year, he cut that total to 22. That was about 40% of his overall improvement. If he can do the same in the third inning, he could actually become the second coming of Clemens. But that is probably expecting a bit too much.

Finally, the expectation that Matsuzaka will become a true ace is quite probably wishful thinking. Conditioning and pacing were issues for Dice-K in ’07: his OPS against went from .625 in innings 1-3 to .833 in innings 4-6, and there was a precipitous drop in Ks per 100 PA when he made it to inning 7 (14.3 as opposed to 26.6 for innings 1-6). If something happened to Papelbon, the Sox would be smart to consider making Matzusaka their closer. But Bill (“Son of Sam”) James would probably re-break the wand if they decided to do that, and parlay it into the last chapter of that “true crime” book he’s writing.

The “true crime”, of course, is the full fledging of a “Red Sox nation” as smug and ”over-mythified” as the hated Empire some two hundred miles to the south, but no one really wants to talk about that.

So I won’t if you don’t.