Winning without pitching

I made a joke a few weeks ago, after Jon Lester got injured, about the Red Sox looking into a radical new model of starting pitching, in which they rolled out a starting rotation composed of Josh Beckett.  I was trying to emphasize how bad the Red Sox’ remaining starting pitchers were, and draw some levity from what was likely to be three weeks of losing way more baseball games than anyone wants to.  But here we are, having gained 3.5 games in the standings since Lester last pitched.  The Sox went 12-2 with the disaster rotation.  How did that happen?  Here are some reasons, in the form of a numbered list:

1) Because Josh Beckett stepped it the **** up.  However much anyone wants to argue about Beckett’s likely future performance, he pitched like an ace when the Red Sox needed him the most.  During the two weeks when Beckett was the only good pitcher the Sox had, he started two games, threw 15 innings and allowed only one run.  The Sox won both games. 

2) Because John Lackey was, you know, pretty good.  He had two good starts (1 run and 0 runs allowed against the Orioles and Mariners) and one against Tampa where he hung in there and let the offense bail him out. 

3) It sure wasn’t because of any other starting pitchers.  Miller, Wakefield, and Weiland combined to allow 36 runs in 41 innings.  Those guys sucked.  The amazing thing is that the Red Sox still won six of the eight games those guys started.  The offense carried them, scoring 63 runs and generally making it seem as if starting pitching isn’t really that big a deal, anyway.  Over the full 14 games stretch, the Sox scored 97 runs – nearly seven per game.

4) Also, the bullpen.  With the rotation in tatters, the bullpen has been pressed into heavy service and come up big again and again.  In 50 innings, they’ve allowed only 15 runs. 

I don’t have any strong conclusions to draw here.  One could argue that this militates against the Sox making a trade for a starting pitcher, because they sure didn’t need one in July.  But the offense, excellent as it is, does not project to score seven runs per game.  They’ll score fewer runs than that, and if Miller and Wakefield keep sucking, or if Lackey reverts to form, or god forbid something happens to our good pitchers, the Sox will lose games.  I think the question of trading for pitching still comes down to three basic questions, and the recent success of the team only really figures into one of them.  These questions can be articulated in a numbered list if you’re still struggling to come up with paragraph segues:

1) How good are the offers?  I have no idea, but this is still by far the most important question.  The Sox should make all good trades, and not make any bad trades.  The other concerns matter only on the margins.

2) How likely are the Sox to make the playoffs?  The BPro playoff odds are frighteningly good – so good I refuse to cite them explicitly – but various cases can be made that the Sox are at more significant risk of missing the playoffs.  If the Sox are overwhelmingly likely to make the playoffs - yikes - then there’s less reason to make a trade that isn’t overwhelmingly favorable.

3) How is Clay Buchholz feeling?  If he is likely to return at full strength, the Sox would be trading only to shore up the back end of the rotation.  If Buchholz might miss the season or return only at half strength, a trade would shore up the front of the rotation.  This would matter both for the remainder of the season - getting Wake or Miller out of the rotation would be nice - and for the playoffs, where the third starter pitches quite a bit more than the fourth starter.

In the end, though, it really all comes down to the actually existing offers.  Hopefully the market is good, and the Sox will be able to acquire good pitching without giving up good prospects.  All other issues are pretty marginal compared to that.  Luckily, with this 12-2 stretch in the rearview, the Sox are a lot closer to the playoffs than they were before the rotation melted down.