Week 7 observations

• All is right in the world. After a season full of disappointment and unfulfilled expectations, the Red Sox sit in third place in the AL East, a half game back of the Yankees and Rays. Most people expected the Sox to run away with the division, but those that respected the offense of the Yankees (1^st in the AL in runs) and the pitching of the Rays (tied for 3^rd in the AL in fewest runs allowed) and saw past the glamour of adding two $20 million players noticed that these three teams were still on fairly equal footing. Not to be forgotten, the Blue Jays behind the mighty Jose Bautista are just one game behind the Red Sox. With several underperforming offensive players, the Jays could also stay in this race all year. If the rain ever decides to let up this year, it should be a great summer for baseball in the AL East. Meanwhile, over in the AL Central…
• The Cleveland Indians cannot be stopped. Their sexiest, I mean best, player, Grady Sizemore goes down again with an injury to his other knee. The rejuvenated Travis Hafner also goes down with an injury. Top soph Carlos Santana is failing to recapture the glory of his rookie season. Shin Soo Choo, fresh off the knowledge that he won’t have to go back to South Korea to serve in the military, is getting a little too comfortable in his American civilian life. The rotation features 3 below average starters and 2 more that were expected to be average at best. And yet, the team keeps winning with Asdrubal Cabrera taking over the reigns as the AL’s top short stop, timely hitting and a strong bull pen. Case in point…
• Last night the Red Sox blew it. The Indians got their Asdrubal assist (3-4 with a homer and 2 RBI including the game winner), timely hitting (down 1 in the eighth scored two runs) and decent bull pen performance. But the Sox really blew it by only mustering 2 runs off Justin Masterson and not plating a run in the ninth. Masterson, traded by the Sox in the Victor Martinez deal, is having a terrific season as the Indians ace. He’s striking out fewer batters than normal, but still destroying right handed batters and inducing a ton of ground balls. But as good as he’s been, he still pitches with a MASSIVE platoon split. Righties this year hit .144/.245/.165 while lefties hit .302/.360/.416. And guess how many lefties the Red Sox ran out last night? Seven. And in 7.2 innings, Masterson held the team to 4 hits and 2 runs. The other missed opportunity came in the bottom of the ninth when Carl Crawford, who was having a good game until that point, came to the plate with runners on first and third and one out needing one run to tie the game. In this situation, the only thing you don’t want to do is hit a ground ball. Luckily for Crawford, closer Chris Perez was on the mound. Perez is a decent reliever and had a really strong year last year, but he is an extreme fly ball pitcher (over 50% of batted balls off Perez are fly balls) meaning Crawford had a better than 50% chance of lifting one in the air, a chance that increases when you consider the fact that he should be trying to put one in the air. Of course, Crawford grounded into a double play to end the game. Crawford is not the biggest goat of this game though. That honor belongs to...
• Daniel Bard. Bard has given up 10 runs in 24 innings this year (he gave up 16 runs all last year) and already has 4 losses. A deep look into Bard’s performance shows that he is doing some things differently this year. For the second year in a row, his strikeout and walk rates have declined, but his K/BB ratio is better than ever. He is throwing his changeup more than normal (10% of the time) which is probably the cause of an increased groundball rate. His home run rate has increased, which is most likely due to small sample size, but I think it is also an indicator of a slightly larger issue with Bard this year. Though his line drive percentage is down, Bard seems to be giving up a lot more hard hit balls this year. He is allowing batters a .184 Isolated Slugging Percentage (SLG-AVG, which shows a hitter’s true power numbers minus his singles), which would rank a hitter in the top third of the league this year. The flukey home run numbers are part of this, but just watching him pitch a lot this year you can see batters making solid contact on him. Part of this may be due to his low first strike percentage. Bard is only starting batters off with a strike 50% of the time, which means in half of all hitters he faces he is starting behind in the count. Usually being behind in the count forces pitchers to throw more balls in the strike zone that a batter can hit. It’s hard to judge a pitcher after 24 innings, but this is just something to keep an eye on. ‘Round these here parts we know not to judge someone after a handful of games, right…
• Jarrod Saltalamacchia? The much maligned Boston starting catcher has been on a tear lately. His overall numbers are still depressed (.229/.282/.385) but hitting from AL catchers this year has been a pit of despair (.227/.298/.367), so overall Salty has been about average. But in the month of May he has been crushing the ball. Since May 6, in 11 games, Salty is 10-34 with 2 doubles and 3 HR. His strikeouts, though still high, have started to come down this year (unfortunately at the expense of his walks). He is probably never going to hit for much average or get on base a lot unless he can get his walk rate back up to his career mark of 8.6%, but there is a lot of power in his bat. As he gets more comfortable behind the plate, the Sox could have a solidly average catcher with above average power for a few years while they work on developing his replacement. Sometimes calling a player average sounds like a knock on him, but really what it means is that he is better than 50% of his competitors, which is incredibly valuable. Also incredibly valuable…
• Solid Spot Starters. With Shuushou (Japanese for “agitation”) and Wilbur the Albatross (my new nicknames for Daisuke Matsuzaka and John Lackey) conveniently heading to the DL in the same week, the Red Sox needed two saviors. As bad as Shuushou and Wilbur the Albatross have pitched, it is always hard to replace two fifths of your rotation in the same week. As I’ve said before, the fill in options are pretty much what you’d expect from 6^th and 7^th starters. But last weekend, albeit against a weak Cubs lineup, Alfredo Aceves and Tim Wakefield gave the Red Sox 11.2 innings of outstanding pitching, only allowing 2 runs for a 1.54 ERA. Wilbur the Albatross will probably come off the DL soon, but whichever of Aceves and Wakefield (probably Wakefield) keep Shuushou’s spot should prove to be at least as effective as Shuushou and Wilbur, if not better. Credit to Theo for keeping respectable backups in place…
• Small ball. How about those throwback unis Saturday night at the Red Sox-Cubs game? Did the Sox unis remind anyone else of the uniforms that players wear when promoting non-league partners like Shaq’s purple outlined jersey in his Icy Hot commercials while he was a member of the Suns? And who are the “Ubs”?... I mentioned Jose Bautista earlier. Through the Blue Jays first 47 games (he’s played in 39) he’s hit 19 homers, has a .503 OBP, a .827 SLG and 1.330 OPS, which is .213 points higher than second place Lance Berkman. His OPS is 168% above league average. For comparison, through Barry Bonds’ first 39 games of 2001, the year he hit 73 HR, he had 15 HR with a .430 OBP, a .739 SLG and a 1.169 OPS. Wow…With interleague play and epic matchups like the Astros and Blue Jays usually comes talk of realignment because of the inequities of the interleague schedule. Most plans are pretty pointless and would not really solve any problems, but this is a pretty solid one I found last week…Check out this awesome video of Adrian Gonzalez swinging like Ichiro from the Sox game against C.C. Sabathia. As much as I don’t care for Ichiro, it’s kinda fun to swing like him and at least in Westboro men’s softball and apparently against C.C. it can be pretty successful…The Sox have series with the Indians and Tigers this week. It feels to me like Boston has played an inordinate amount of series against non-AL East teams so far this year and that we are going to be loading up on the division at the end of the year. Luckily, the internet shows me things and I can see that yes, in fact, in September the team plays just 3 games against teams outside the division. Woo boy that is going to be intense…With all the rain we’ve had, this quote from Phillies broadcaster Harry Kalas is probably no longer accurate (probably more like 4/5), but it is still awesome, “Two-thirds of the Earth is covered by water, the other one-third is covered by Garry Maddox.”