Coulda Shoulda Woulda: Tradez and Such-like

The Red Sox are, of course, not dead yet.  A 5-1 stretch this last week has them still within shouting distance of the Rays and Yankees.  BP’s numbers have the Sox at 25% to make the playoffs (regular playoff odds), 10% (PECOTA-adjusted odds), or 20% (ELO odds).

But the trade deadline has come and gone, and with it, most of Theo’s best chances to improve the team for the stretch run.  Really, I think the critical time to improve the team came and went much earlier, in June and July. 

1) ...

Trades?  I Say “Maybe”

It’s weird to be two weeks from the deadline and not have insane seven-team, five all-star rumors swirling around the Sox.  This should be a quiet deadline.  I think, though, there are some small-bore trades that make sense for the Red Sox.

The Red Sox certainly shouldn’t be sellers at the deadline – they’re still in the range of 1-in-3 to make the playoffs, and that’s far too great of a chance at a World Series to give away. 

So, what should they buy?  As per the previous thread, ...

All-Star Break Thread: Not As Depressing As You Expect

The Red Sox finished the first half of the season with a 51-37 record, on pace for 94 wins.  Given the injuries they’ve suffered, there’s really nothing to complain about – the Sox have played well, and Theo and Tito have done very well to plug the holes that keep opening up.  We can’t help it that the Yankees and Rays are on pace for 103 and 99 wins, respectively. 

Looking ahead, the BP “playoff odds report” has the Sox at between 38-44% to make the playoffs, which would be ...

Minor League Thread: Other Things That Are Also Bad

A midseason survey of Baseball America’s top ten Red Sox prospects, with MLEs for high minors hitters.

1) Ryan Westmoreland – had successful surgery on a “cavernous malformation” in his brain this spring, is recovering well and beginning baseball activities.  Whether, following major brain surgery and neurological rehabilitation, Westmoreland will still stand among the couple dozen best young ballplayers in the world is an open question that won’t be addressed until next year at the ...

It Gets Really, Really Bad

The Red Sox just lost two of their three best players to injury in the span of a week.  Dustin Pedroia won’t see a major league diamond until August, while Victor Martinez will (theoretically) return after the All-Star break.  And of course, already the club has been dealing with the loss of most of the starting outfield and a couple spotty starting pitchers. 

Bill Hall will give the Red Sox a lot more offensive production than most clubs could expect from a backup second baseman, but ...

Red Sox Draft Thread

I never follow amateur baseball until June 5th or so, and as such I don’t actually know anything about this draft other than that Bryce Harper wears eyeblack like he’s embarrassed to have cheeks.  The Red Sox have successfully switched drafting strategies over the last few years, now focusing their early picks on upside-y high school talent and leveraging their huge piles of money to go over-slot in the late rounds.  I assume they’ll, you know, continue to do that.  I open the thread to ...

You Know Who’s Really Kind of Great?  Adrian Beltre is Really Kind of Great.

The Red Sox were 19-19 on May 17th, heading into a two-game set with New York that felt like it might be the season.  They lost the first game in New York in about as awful a fashion imaginable.  In hindsight, though, the eight-run comeback the offense put together marked the beginning of the resurgence of the Red Sox, who have gone 13-4 since, including sweeps of the Twins and Rays. 

The big story of this resurgence has obviously been David Ortiz, but I think a case could be made that the ...

What’s Wrong With John Lackey?

John Lackey was the Red Sox’ big offseason signing.  I hailed the move as “pretty logical” at the time, and most folks agreed that Lackey’s a good pitcher - maybe he was being overpaid some, maybe he wasn’t, but he was a solidly above average pitcher.  The contract could be a problem by 2013, that was the objection.

Instead, the Red Sox would very nearly be better off without Lackey, this year.  He’s given them a couple of good starts, but the overall numbers are bad - a 5.07 ERA that can’t be ...

The Papelbon Debate

Is Jonathan Papelbon still a good closer?  I think he is - he was one last year, he was one the year before that, and the year before that, and the year before that. Any statistical engagement with the question will hold that Papelbon is among baseball’s best relievers.

The case that Papelbon sucks has to rest on observations about his pitching - that there are real changes in quality that haven’t shown themselves over a long enough period of time to produce a useful statistical sample.  (ie, ...

This Series Matters in a Quantifiable Way

One of the requirements for helping to write a bi-monthly addition to a sabermetric blog is that, when the Red Sox play their first series against the Yankees, you have to talk about how most early season series don’t matter, but this one is different.  I swear before every series someone says that.  Someone’s probably already said it on this board somewhere. 

I thought I’d take a very quick-and-dirty look at how much this series matters.  I put together a spreadsheet that uses the ...

The Weird Week That Was Weird

On the surface, this was a very successful rebound week for the Boston Red Sox.  They came in at 4-9 and took back to back series from the Rangers and Orioles, then won their first game at Toronto for a 5-2 record since being swept by Tampa.  The Rays and Yankees continued to play well, but the Red Sox at least managed not to lose more ground on the league leaders.

Anyone who watched the games, though, knows the week was, well, weirder than all that.  Six of the seven games were decided by one ...

How Should Tito Manage the Slump?

We all believe that 15 games generally cannot amount to sufficient data for any confident conclusions about teams or ballplayers.  .  It seems pretty evident that Theo Epstein and Terry Francona agree with us on this score.

It doesn’t follow from this, though, that the manager should do nothing.  He shouldn’t do anything stupid like swap one of his best pitchers out into middle relief, but clearly Epstein and Francona decided, before the Texas series, to make a show of aggressive ...

Minor League Thread: Pulling Me Back In

Ten games into the season is no time to be making dumb extrapolations from minor league statistics, but from another perspective, it is the perfect time.

Three of the Red Sox top prospects of 2008 have been encouragingly not terrible, even kinda great, over the first games of 2010.  Lars Anderson is the biggest – he has three homers in the first ten games, after knocking only nine all of last season, en route to a nice 316/381/632 line.  The Dominican bonus baby pair of Oscar Tejeda and ...

What’s Wrong?  Everything.

They say that failure is an orphan, but in the case of the Red Sox 4-9 start to the season, failure is like some sort of test tube clone freak spliced from the DNA of dozens of different people.  And it is like other, better similes as well.

The Sox have been outscored 69 to 50, which projects to a record closer to 5-8 than 4-9.  So they’ve been marginally poor at turning runs into wins.  The Sox have a .329 wOBA, 5th in the AL, but they’re 10th in the league in runs scored.  So they’ve ...

How Good Is Josh Beckett?

There appears to be a developing BTF consensus that Josh Beckett’s 4/68 extension is perfectly fair, and probably somewhat favorable to the Red Sox.  John Lackey, whose ERA+ numbers have been functionally equivalent to Beckett’s the last three years, got a bit more from the Red Sox.  Walt Davis mentions Carlos Zambrano (5/91), AJ Burnett (5/82) and Derek Lowe (4/60) as comparables.  That all looks reasonably good.

But we’re statheads, right?  We stopped caring about actual runs prevented years ...

Baseball!!

What’s the deal with this?  It’s opening day and it’s 75 degrees out and it’s a night game.  Consider this an open thread to draw far-reaching and panicky conclusions about the Red Sox after just one game, and then consider this an open thread to perform your emotional and intellectual superiority as represented by your lack of concern and/or tempered excitement about the events of the game.

In unimportant news, Terry Francona’s lineup matches almost exactly what I projected in one of the ...

I Haven’t Been Watching Spring Training

For a variety of boring reasons, I’ve watched only a handful of innings this spring.  I think this lack has also shaped my expectations, in that I haven’t really changed any of the opinions I held after watching the team in ’09 and then seeing the projection spreadsheets in February.  The two major divergences between my expectations and those of the broader March-baseball-watching Therapudlian population seem to be David Ortiz and Josh Reddick. 

The following are their projections ...

Your Two Thousand and Ten Boston Red Sox

We’re a week away from opening day against the Yankees, so it seems like a good time to look at the roster.

C: Martinez, Varitek
IF: Youkilis, Pedroia, Beltre, Scutaro, Hall, 25th man
OF: Ellsbury, Cameron, Drew, Hermida
DH: Ortiz

SP: Beckett, Lester, Lackey, Wakefield, Buchholz
RP: Papelbon, Okajima, Bard, Ramirez, Delcarmen, 6th reliever, 7th reliever

Mike Lowell is the 25th man if he can play baseball, but that appears doubtful.  While Lowell’s role would be to back up the corners and ...