In which I listen to Theo Epstein’s public statements

Theo gave an interview to WEEI this morning, helpfully transcribed at the Globe Extra Bases blog.  I like what he had to say about the losing streak.

On if the bad play becomes contagious throughout the team:

“It seems that way. It’s hard to tell whether it actually is. It probably is to a small extent and beyond that it’s just seems that way when so many things aren’t going well. I do think that when you have a run of bad starting pitching, it does obviously impact the bullpen, and has a little bit of effect on the offense as well. They go into at-bats early in the game feeling like they’re down 5-0, sometimes they are, sometimes it just feels that way, and it’s hard to have, especially with our kind of approach, you need to be patient, you need to have good at-bats, let the other guys knock you in, sort of the group offense mentality. Hard to have those kind of at-bats when you feel like you need to put a crooked number on the board all the time. I’m sure that’s the way it is, guys start looking at each other wondering who’s going to step up, sure. When you’re playing well, we won two out of every three games over four months, there’s a contagiousness to that when you’re expecting things to go well, and when you’re on the other side of the coin, sure, you’re expecting things to go poorly.

“The thing we have going for us here, beyond the fact that we’re a very good team just not playing like it right now, is that we’ve pulled ourselves out of this before. April was no walk in the park, different from September, you’ve got the length of the season to fix things, but you were around the team then, you remember what that was like, That was not fun. And this team did a great job of pulling itself out of that, so we certainly can do it again and have to. We’ve been punched in the mouth here a little bit, it’s how we respond that matters.”

As he says, team-wide slumps really do happen.  And to a certain degree, you can see that happening with the Boston Red Sox.  However, it’s extremely difficult, even from within the organization, to distinguish a run of bad play that happened to occur from a real choking event.  Further, both runs of bad play and real choking events occur, and then end.  Teams start playing well after playing poorly, or teams mentally right the ship and win a bunch of games.  It’s certainly possible that the Sox are really choking and will continue to choke, but baseball experience teaches us that there are other explanations and other expectations which tend to be more likely to be correct.

I should address the “our pitchers all suck” dilemma.  They do, and there isn’t a really good solution.  Putting Aceves in the rotation is a good idea, but it doesn’t solve the entire problem.  However, the Sox have had Lackey and Miller and Wakefield in the rotation for most of the season.  In games started by Lackey, Wakefield, Miller, Weiland, and Aceves, the Red Sox have gone 34-30.  It’s not because those guys are good pitchers - other than maybe Aceves, they ain’t - but it’s because bad pitchers pitch well sometimes, and sometimes a great offense wins games regardless of the pitching.  The Red Sox were a Marco Scutaro check swing away from winning Weiland’s start on Saturday, for instance. 

As Epstein says, elsewhere in the interview, the solution is simple: the Sox have to play good ball.  It’s certainly well into the realm of possibility that they won’t play well enough to win the Wild Card - the chances are probably now into the 7-to-1 or 4-to-1 range that isn’t terribly unlikely anymore.  So hell yes I’m worried. Hell no the games haven’t been any fun.  But you still usually win when you have the better hand against a draw going to the last card, and you still usually win when you have a 3 or 4 game lead with three weeks to play.