Week 9 observations

• Peaks and valleys. There’s really no better way to describe a baseball season than peaks and valleys. More so than in any other sport, the best teams will look crappy for a string and the worst teams will look dominant. The Yankees have lost 6 in a row earlier this season and the Twins are in the midst of a 4 game winning streak, their 4^th streak of 3 or more wins this year despite having a grand total of 21 wins. Perhaps no team is embodying the spirit of peaks and valleys better (worse?) than your Boston Red Sox. They started as the San Andreas Fault, then leveled out like a 300 mile stretch of Ohio highway, then peaked as hard as Everest all the way to first place. Then they take a trip to Sudden Valley at the hands of the Chicago White Sox only to scale Tiny Town in a jet pack over the Oakland A’s. Perhaps no player is capturing this spirit better (worse?) than…
• Jon Lester. He probably deserves a more in depth look (though you can get one here), but it is clear that Lester is not pitching like he has over the last 3 years. After his opening day stinker, Lester strung together 6 strong to excellent starts. In 5 starts since then he has had just one “Lesterian” performance. In those 5 starts, Lester has thrown just 29 innings, allowing 5 HR, 35 hits and 16 walks. As he has become one of the best strikeout pitchers in the majors the last 2 years, Lester’s walk rates have also grown. This is a strategy that can definitely work, but it has to correspond with keeping the ball in the park and limiting hits. So far, he is allowing 50% more home runs per 9 innings than he has over his career and in those last 5 starts has been the victim of some lucky hits by the opposition. If he can get the homers back to his career levels, the hits should start finding gloves and the old Lester should return. And if he doesn’t return to form, at least we have...
• John Lackey. Wilbur the Albatross returns from the DL with a vengeance! Ok, so vengeance may be a little strong. After nearly a month of inactivity, Wilbur posted a solid victory (5.2 IP, 3 ER, 3 H, 2 SO, 2 BB, 1 HR) against the A’s. Yes, the A’s offense is terrible (second to last in the AL in runs scored), but Wilbur did show some encouraging signs. I was busy being the John Lackey of golf yesterday (114 on 18) so I missed the game, but Sexy Boston Sports Field Reporter Joe Black was on the scene providing me with the following live analysis: “Why did they just pull lackey? Pretty early, no?”; “Dope game”; “(His velocity was about 92) but he was around 88-89 towards the end. It was an awesome game though.” If we look at the PitchFX report from BrooksBaseball.net, we see that Joe was pretty accurate in his assessment. Wilbur was dope and could have possibly stayed in longer, but it did appear he was tiring at the end. Lackey’s first two pitches clocked in at 92 and his third was 93.3, his fastest of the day. For the first 4 innings he maintained that speed but in the fifth the velocity started to decrease and he started relying on more off-speed pitches, ending the day with a couple fastballs in the 89 MPH range. Luckily for Wilbur, the Sox offense had done more than enough by that point, led by the new clutch king…
• Carl Crawford. If it seems like these weekly updates are dominated by Lackey and Crawford, it’s because they have had the most remarkable seasons (remarkable isn’t always a good thing) of anyone on the team. In the 3 Red Sox wins this past week, Crawford was truly a $20 million player. In Friday’s game, he salvaged a poor Clay Buchholz start with a bases loaded single in the 7^th that would score what would prove to be the winning run. Saturday afternoon, he drove in 3 insurance runs in the 6^th and 8^th innings that turned out to be absolutely necessary as Papelbon imploded in the ninth (must be because it was a non-save situation, riiiiight). Then, in the 14^th, Crawford hit a 2 out double and came around to score the winning run on J.D. Drew’s single. Finally, to pour some delicious Boston Market gravy on the weekend, Crawford staked Wilbur to a 3-0 lead with a 3 run homer in the second, his 5^th of the season, to help take a little pressure off the returning albatross. After another excellent week (.965 On Base Plus Slugging (OPS)), Crawford is on the road back towards respectability. The team will need this hot hitting as they gear up yet again to face...
• The New York Yankees. Winners of 6 of the last 7, the Yankees have reclaimed the top spot in the East heading into the rivalry showdown. It’s actually kind of amazing what this team is doing this year. Yes they have by far the biggest payroll in baseball and they are the Yankees, but a good handful of the key players driving the bus this year are not really a part of that group of hated Yankees. Curtis Granderson is among the league leaders in homers this year and despite his pinstripes is one of the best guys in the league. Russell Martin has slipped from his first month dominance, but he seems like a guy I would love to have on the Sox and he is Canadian so he’s probably nice. Bartolo Colon and Freddy Garcia are a couple reclamation projects that the damn Yankees always seem to find, but since they remind me of a possible WWF tag team (Rikishi and The Rock), I don’t really hate them very much. I still hope we beat the piss out of them, but I am having some mixed emotions about this team and I don’t like it. Let’s just move on to…
• The Toronto Blue Jays. I’m sort of confused why the Blue Jays don’t get more attention as a contender. They have an identical run differential (runs scored-runs allowed) to the Red Sox, which is a more accurate way of looking at a team’s true talent level than wins and losses. They have the runaway early favorite for MVP in Jose Bautista. I’ve mentioned it before, but Bautista is having one of the great seasons of all time. He has fallen off the Barry Bonds home run pace, but he is still destroying the ball, posting an OPS+ of 237 (which is 137% better than league average in case you forgot my tutorial from last week). The team is getting huge contributions from first baseman Adam Lind, fresh off the DL, and Braves castoff short stop Yunel Escobar. Probably the main reason they get overlooked is the fact that only one of their starters, Ricky Romero, has an ERA better than league average. I actually see this as a positive as they have been able to hang around thus far with mediocre pitching from pitchers who should all improve as the season progresses. With a couple difficult opponents this week, let’s keep our fingers crossed for a .500 road trip...
• Small ball.  I enjoyed seeing Drew get the game winning hit Saturday. It’s been a rough year for J.D., but as you will see in a post this week or next, I have a soft spot for the guy even though almost nobody else does...Another guy who’s been struggling, Albert Pujols, spent the weekend breaking the broken hearts of Cubs fans with walkoff homeruns in consecutive days. This is only the third time a player has ever done this, matched by the same named Albert Belle and former Cub Ron Santo…In the land of unsurprising news, Jacoby Ellsbury leads the Red Sox in steals so far with 22. What is surprising is who is second on the team. It’s not the guy who has topped 40 steals in 7 seasons, Carl Crawford. It’s the guy who has never stolen more than 20 bags in a season who also broke his foot last year, Dustin Pedroia, with 13…It looks as though we can finally wave goodbye to Shuushou (Daisuke Matsuzaka) for good. He is set to undergo Tommy John surgery this month, a surgery that takes at least a year to come back from. Maybe we’ll see him around next season’s All Star break but I think it would be good for everyone involved if he just rode off into the sunset…Extra props to Alfredo Aceves for his 4 innings of relief in the extra inning affair Saturday. He had a bad start earlier in the week, but his return to the bullpen saved the team after Papelbon’s boner of an outing…Since I’ve got serious writer’s block today, I’m going to be lazy and end this with a quote from a writer whom I will never match, Robert Frost, who aptly captures the peaks and valleys in a baseball season: “Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.”