It happens every year. A manager gets an itchy trigger finger early in the season and buries a guy before he even gets a chance to earn the faith the manager put in him to start the season. This year is no different, and with an idea sparked from Eric Seidman’s piece yesterday on Brad Emaus — an article that the Mets completely ignored when they waived him today — I present the 2011 Brad Emaus All-Stars.
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Thus far, 2011 has not been kind to the Boston Red Sox and Daisuke Matsuzaka. Through two turns in the rotation, Matsuzaka has given up more earned runs than innings pitched. After allowing three runs on six hits in five innings during his first start, he lasted just two innings last night; surrendering seven runs on eight hits and two walks.
Full small sample size disclosure, but in seven innings of work, opposing lineups have 10 earned runs on 14 hits, and five walks against Matsuzaka. He has just four strikeouts and served up three home runs – including one to Sam Fuld. In addition to some rather alarming results, the process at which he’s going about it also leaves something to be desired.
After a middling first start, the media was ready to jump on Josh Beckett. The results weren’t bad, exactly, but he didn’t quite look like the pre-2010 Beckett. In their podcast the following day, ESPN’s David Schoenfield, Keith Law, and Eric Karabell talked about Beckett’s lack of conditioning. Red Sox blog Fire Brand of the AL mentioned it, too. Yet there were many pitchers who performed poorly in their first outings who didn’t get called out for conditioning issues. Perhaps this was an ex-post explanation for the bad outing following a poor 2010 season. But, poor conditioning or not, he came back to completely shut down the Yankees last night. I doing so, he looked a lot like the Beckett of old.
With today’s 1-0 loss to the Indians, the Boston Red Sox are now 0-6. This is the same Red Sox team that many people, myself included, tabbed as the favorites to win the World Series. So far, they haven’t hit (only Minnesota has been worse offensively after today’s shutout) and they really haven’t pitched (entering the day with a ridiculous 8.25 FIP), and the total team meltdown has led to a miserable start to the season and a 4 1/2 game deficit behind the East-leading Orioles.
Those last three words should be all you need to know about whether the current standings are predictive of where we’ll be at year’s end, but that hasn’t stopped a number of people from pointing out that no team that has ever begun the season 0-6 has gone on to play in the World Series, and only two out of the 85 teams to ever start 0-5 (or worse) had even made the playoffs. Those sound like seriously scary numbers until you realize that there’s a huge sampling bias problem – most teams that start a season with a long losing streak kind of suck. By virtue of filtering only teams that have lost a bunch of games to start the season, we’re left looking at the records of teams who inherently lacked talent in most cases, and holding those teams up as examples of how the 2011 Red Sox (who don’t suck, despite their poor start) will play going forward doesn’t work.
At this point in the ratings, there aren’t any surprises. I imagine there weren’t too many surprises about the top few spots even before this series began. While I imagine few would see the Red Sox as anything other than one of the top organizations in baseball, the particulars of the rating do hold some interest.
Present Talent – 89.55 (3rd)
Future Talent – 85.00 (t-5th)
Financial Resources – 90.83 (2nd)
Baseball Operations – 89.55 (2nd)
Overall Rating – 89.25 (2nd)
The acquisitions of Carl Crawford and Adrian Gonzalez highlighted an offseason that has most pundits now calling the Boston Red Sox the best team in baseball. But are we being too optimistic about a team that was projected by many experts to win the AL East last year, only to finish third and out of the playoffs? Let’s take a look.
Projected Starting Lineup
1 CF Jacoby Ellsbury*
2 2B Dustin Pedroia
3 LF Carl Crawford*
4 1B Adrian Gonzalez*
5 3B Kevin Youkilis
6 DH David Ortiz*
7 RF J.D. Drew*
8 C Jarrod Saltalamacchia**
9 SS Marco Scutaro
