Wild Time

If a team clinches something, and it really isn’t a “championship” of anything (no matter what the hats say), and it happens because of something another team does, and there’s a celebration, but it happens three hours after the game and no reporters are allowed to watch, did something really get clinched?

That’s the question this morning after the Angels beat the Rangers to put the Red Sox into postseason play for the sixth time in the last seven years. Of course it is all a moot point if the Sox can’t get their pitching straightened out, and fast.

Something has gone wrong each of the last four days, so the next week, when the starters make one final appearance before the playoffs begin next Wednesday or Thursday, will be crucial in determining Boston’s playoff pitching rotation.

First it was Jon Lester getting hit hard by the Yankees, literally. Then it was Josh Beckett being pulled from a start because of back spasms. He had three cortisone shots, and will get a final regular-season start next Saturday. Finally, Clay Buchholz got hammered by the Blue Jays to complete the trifecta. There are your top three starters for the playoffs.

And, as for number four, Tim Wakefield starts tonight to test his body again, as though all the back and leg problems that have kept him on the DL for most of the second half of the season will just go away and he’ll be fine to pitch through October. If he can’t continue, we’re left with Paul Byrd.

This presents pitching coach John (let me jot that down) Farrell with the biggest dilemma/challenge of his time with the Sox. Usually, teams give their pitchers a final tune-up start before the playoffs begin. Farrell has to find out if his three top pitchers can actually pitch. With Byrd as the fourth starter, there really are no other options at this point. Ironic isn’t it? The team that supposedly had too much pitching in May is now struggling to find enough pitchers to round out the rotation when it really counts.

And the Sox bullpen is not settled either. The supposed “best bullpen in baseball’ has been getting lit up lately on a regular basis. Hideki Okajima was sent back to Boston during the road trip with arm issues. Manny Delcarmen is now officially useless while Daniel Bard and Billy Wagner are taking turns being ineffective. For the last couple of weeks, the best pitchers leading up to Papelbon have been “Oh No” Ramon Ramirez and Takashi Saito.

At least after Monday night we know that one option will not be Michael Bowden, Hunter Jones and Dustin Richardson.

By the way, the Sox have now been the Wild Card playoff entry six times. Hooray! We set a record for finishing second!

This and That

Early in the season, it was the Red Sox making a statement. We can beat you in April. Then the Yankees made a statement. We can beat you in May, June, July, August, September and, probably, October. While the Sox were swept again, the Yankees clinched the AL East title for the first time in three seasons, spending a half a billion dollars to ensure that they did. Now, having put the message out there that “We can beat you in high-scoring games, we can beat you in low-scoring games, we can beat you any time we want to, it’s on to the playoffs.”

Remember what Bill Parcells always said: “The first step is just to make the tournament.” But the Sox haven’t done that yet.

A couple of newcomers made a couple of great plays over the last week, as Alex Gonzales grabbed a ball to his left, twisted and turned and crawled to the second-base bag for a forceout. Then Victor Martinez, with two outs and the bases loaded, dove down the first base line, grabbed the ball, then dove back to the plate for the out. Two very similar plays that neither Nick Green nor Jason Varitek could have made.

Back in the preseason, we were wondering which Josh Beckett we were going to get this year, the 2006 model or the 2007 model. With the season almost over, it looks like the answer is 2006. Beckett has 16 wins, which is his average number of wins in a season over his nine-year career. All ballplayers have a career year, when the numbers stand out as a statistical anomaly (Yaz in 1967, Rice in 1978) and 2007 is Beckett’s career year. He’s a very good pitcher, but he may never duplicate that season again. I wonder what that will mean to the Sox when his contract comes up again after the 2010 season.

Every ballplayer has a time when they suddenly “get it” and it is a career-changing moment. For Jon Lester it was his no-hitter last year. For Clay Buccholz, it was the August 29 game against Toronto when he went 8 1/3 innings, gave up one run and struck out nine. He was 3-3 at that point, but since then has gone 4-0 with one no-decision, a 1.38 ERA with 24 hits in 32 innings. That’s even better than Jon Lester’s 4-1, 3.07 for the month.

The Pawsox ended their season at 61-82 with no notable performances by anybody. Their top pitcher, Enrique Gonzales, won eight games. Their top hitter, Mets-bound Chris Carter, had 16 home runs and 61 RBIs. So, they fired their hitting coach, Russ Mormon. He couldn’t make better hitters out of retreads like Paul McAnulty, Travis Denker and Chip Ambres. In those cases it’s not the hitting coach’s fault. Sometimes you just have guys who are in the minors for a reason: They can’t hit. The problem was that the alleged prospects at Pawtucket weren’t hitting either. Mark Wagner (.214), Aaron Bates (.213), Bubba Bell (.208) and Travis Denker (.238), all of whom had worked their way through the Sox minor league system, had hitting problems once they reached AAA-ball. Time will tell. Maybe none of them were good enough to make the majors anyway, but for all four of them it was a lost season.

And good luck to Chris Carter, who will be joining the Mets system in the off-season as the player-to-be-named-later in the Billy Wagner trade. Carter, who came here as the player-to-be-named later in the Wily Mo Pena trade to Washington, put up solid, if not spectacular, numbers in two seasons.

Speaking of minor leaguers, at the start of the season, the hottest prospects in the system were Lars Anderson, Michael Bowden and Junichi Tazawa. Anderson came nowhere near the hype, hitting .233 with only nine homers, 51 RBIs and 114 strikeouts. Bowden, who has not reached his “get it” point yet, had a decent year, 4-6 for a bad club with a 3.13 ERA, 88 strikeouts and 106 hits in 126 innings. Tazawa had an outstanding first pro season, posting a 9-7 record combined at Portland and Pawtucket with a 2.63 ERA and 94 strikeouts in 109 innings before coming to the majors. But the best pitcher I saw in the minors this year was Felix Dubront, a poised lefthander who was 9-6, 3.35 ERA for the Seadogs striking out 101 batters in 121 innings. The 23-year old was 13-9, 3.70 in 2008, so that’s two good seasons in a row. He should move up to Pawtucket and maybe Boston next season, potentially ahead of Bowden.

When the Orioles Were Good

Here’s a cautionary tale for Red Sox fans getting ready to celebrate another trip to the postseason: Baltimore Orioles fans used to celebrate, too. Once, the Orioles were one of the great franchises in baseball and they have the World Series trophies to prove it.

In fact, many years ago, when I was about 11, some friends and I thought about abandoning the Red Sox and joining “Orioles Nation.”, if in fact there was one. This was 1961 and the Sox were in a decade-long mess while the O’s were an up-and-coming team on its way to a 95-win season with such young pitchers as Steve Barber, Chuck Estrada and Milt Pappas, who won 46 games among them. The young Brooks Robinson was on that team along with first baseman Jim Gentile whose .302/46 HR/141 RBI season was better than anyone Boston had to offer. Marv Throneberry even got into 56 games, one year before he became Marvelous Marv for the Amazin’ 1962 Mets. This was a team heading for great things!

Looking at that roster, there were a lot of Red Sox connections and several future managers and coaches. In addition to Adair, Williams would go on and play for the Sox before turning to managing. Jim Busby, Gene Stephens and Walt Dropo had all played for the Sox and Charlie Lau would be their hitting coach 20 years in the future. It was on this team that left fielder Dick Williams met Wes Stock, who was his pitching coach during the years Williams managed Oakland and Seattle.

Well, my friends and I decided to stick with the Sox, who sucked for six more seasons until former O’s player Dick Williams managed Boston to the 1967 pennant, helped by Jerry Adair, the Orioles 1961 second baseman. Good thing, because in 1962 the O’s slipped back to 77-85, tied with the Sox for seventh place.

But, then Baltimore started moving up again. They won 97 games in 1964 and finished third, having added Luis Aparicio from the White Sox and Boog Powell (39 homers) and Wally Bunker (19 wins) from their farm system. The next year, most of the pieces were in place as speedy Paul Blair became the regular center fielder (playing shallower than any other center fielder before or since), and rookies Dave McNally, Jim Palmer and Mark Belanger came up.

A year later, it all came together in the person of Frank Robinson. Acquired for three spare parts (Jack Baldschun, Milt Pappas and Dick Simpson), Robinson was the veteran presence the club needed to sweep the Dodgers in the World Series.

And in the pre-free agency era, this team was able to stay together and stay successful, going to three consecutive World Series (1969-71), winning it all again in 1970. They even had four 20-game winners on the staff in 1971 (Palmer, Cuellar, Dobson, McNally), the only time that has ever happened.

The Birds flew around the top of the American League, bringing in Hall of Famers Cal Ripken and Eddie Murray along with pitchers Scott McGregor and Mike Flanagan.

But then, it happened.

On October 9, 1996, in game one of the ALCS, calm-eyed Derek Jeter intangibly lofted a fly ball to right field. O’s right fielder Tony Tarasco got ready to catch it. Instead, Jeffrey Maier reached out of the stands and caught the ball, which was ruled a game-tying home run instead of fan interference and an out. The Orioles lost the series, the ALCS the next year, and apparently the will to win. In the 12 years since, they have finished next-to-last or last in the AL East 11 times, including this season when they will finish last.

Call it the curse of Jeffrey Maier. Or maybe it’s the curse of Peter Angelos, one of Sports Illustrated’s five worst owners, who has never let the Orioles be free-agent players except for 2007 when they cornered the market in middle relievers.

Whatever it is, the Sox won the season series 16-2 yesterday. Baltimore’s only two wins were in games started by John Smoltz, one of them the rain-delayed 11-10 loss.

I’m glad I didn’t switch 48 years ago.

What they're saying in Texas

One of the things that I do on a regular basis is visit Web sites in the cities of the competition to see what they are saying. With the Sox battling Texas (sort of) for the Wild Card, today I went to Dallasnews.com, the Dallas Morning News site (their equivalent of Boston.com) to find out how things are with the slumping Rangers.

Here’s what I found out:

• The lead on the Sports page was “Balanced Allen hands Trinity second straight loss.” Oh yeah, Texas, high school football, “Friday Night Lights” and all that. Apparently the Dillon Panthers have a bye week, because there was no mention of them.
• The Cowboys-Giants game on Sunday night is expected to draw 100,000 people.
• Some of the people who won’t be there are folks who have had Cowboys’ season tickets for years but have been priced out of the Cowboys new stadium by the $350 ticket prices, the $25,000 personal seat licenses and the $1,000 option fee to renew season tickets.
• The Cowboys have had success getting to Eli Manning
• The Cowboys hope to contain their opening night emotions.
• There was a lot of trash-talking about the Giants in the Cowboys’ locker room this week.
• The team has a Web site to provide you with your best route to the parking lots at the game, where parking will cost as much as $60! And we thought Foxboro was bad.
• Jerry Jones is ready to preside over the festivities as he rakes in the cash at the new stadium.
• Oh, yeah, there was one story telling me that the Rangers lost to the Angels. And another reminding Rangers fans that the game on Sunday starts at noon, and to get there early if they want to park for the normal Rangers’ parking price of $8. After noon, you will pay the Cowboys’ price of $60.

Apparently the teams share a parking lot, but they sure don’t share space on Dallasnews.com.

OFF TOPIC: The trade of Phil Kessel for three draft choices will go down in history as the Bruins’ version of Jeff Bagwell for Larry Andersen.

A real quick comment

Some games are not worth four hours of your time. This one was.

And as for Cryin' Brian Fuentes, throw strikes, get outs and you don't put yourself in the postion to lose the game. C'mon, you were beaten by Jed Lowrie, Nick Green and Alex Rodriguez, a trio of light-hitting shortstops.

From the Globe: "Along one row of lockers, closer Brian Fuentes suggested umpires can be swayed by the crowd and mystique of Fenway Park, and that players on his team and across the league share the sentiment. “You hear it time and time again,’’ Fuentes said."

I think they call that home-field advantage.

Who was that Man?

He pitched into the seventh inning and only threw 93 pitches, and with confidence. When he got two strikes on a batter, he threw strike three, instead of nibbling to a 3-2 count. He worked fast ( instead of a close to four hour game, it was over in less that three). No, it wasn’t Roy Halladay or Mark Buerhle, it was our very own Dice-K!

I must admit I was not looking forward to last night. Who was? I was interested in what I would see from Matsuzaka, but I expected more of the same. A ton of base runners, a lot of time furiously rubbing the ball, and Angels flying around the bases.

Instead, it was a turnaround. Maybe Dice-K is finally listening to the Sox pitching coaches and making some concessions in his methods to the American game. If he can show more of the same in the three or four starts he will get before the season ends he could help the Sox in the postseason should they get there.

And maybe even for seasons to come.

It’s always interesting to watch the Anaheim Angels not of Los Angeles play their own brand of baseball. We haven’t seen them since the Red Sox and Angels played six times in the first five weeks of the seasonwhen the Angels won four of the six games on the West Coast. This is the first and only visit the Angels will make to Fenway.

Unless….

If things continue the way they are, the Sox and Angels will meet in the ALDS again in what has become as regular an event as the leaves changing color. The teams met in 2004, 2007 and 2008 with the Sox holding a 9-1 record over those three years.

So, what has gone on with the Angels since we last saw them? Well, they were 18-15 on May 14, in second place. Since then they have gone 68-43, 25 games over .500, losing only 16 games in all of June and July.

The team is led, as always, by Chone Figgins, who is hitting .303 with 41 steals. But they have surrounded him with some good young hitters who have come into their own like Kendry Morales, Erick Aybar and Juan Rivera. Plus veterans Vlad Guerrero, Bobby Abreu and Torii Hunter are all around .300, which makes Matsuzaka’s performance all the more impressive.

Pitching-wise, Jered Weaver is 15-5, while Joe Saunders and John Lackey have 23 wins between them. The Angels recently acquired Scott Kazmir, who has a 1.86 ERA in three starts. Brian Fuentes has 41 saves, replacing K-Rod at the end of the bullpen.

As we know, the Angels do lots of things well.

Tampa Bay steals a lot of bases, the Yankees hit home runs in bunches, the White Sox like to hit-and-run. The Angels do all of the above. They lead the league in hitting, have 136 steals and 153 home runs. They are second in team defense, fourth in sacrifice bunts and first in sacrifice flies. They are second in hits. If they get a runner to second with nobody out, that runner scores 48% of the time.

All in all, a pretty impressive set of numbers, offensively. But the Angels are only one games better than the Red Sox. Why? Because, for all their woes and disorganization, the Sox have a better team ERA (4.44 to 4.67) and a better bullpen.

Last night’s game was a good performance, and, with Texas losing, the Wild Card lead is up to 5 ½ games. With a long road trip looming, the last of the season, it’s a good time for the Sox to put some space between them and the Rangers and also make a statement to their likely first-round opponents.

Up on the Roof

When the new owners (and it looks like they will always be referred to as the new owners) bought the Red Sox, they paid so much for the team that there was no way they could build a new ballpark, a luxury the fans of 28 other teams have enjoyed, some twice. So, they set about trying to fool us into thinking we had a new ballpark by putting seats into different places, throwing huge ads above them, and charging lots of money to sit in them. Meanwhile, most of us were left with the 1930s-era grandstand seats, many of which face Logan Airport.

Well, I finally got my shot at the new seats. Last March, after sitting in the Virtual Waiting Room for the usual several hours, I scored tickets to the seats on the right field roof under the Giant Beer Conglomerate sign. On Wednesday, we trudged up the golden spiral staircase for the game against the Orioles.

The Sox won the game, 7-5, and it was a pretty good game, with Victor Martinez driving in three runs with a pinch-hit double for the win.

I wish I could say the seats are pretty good. They aren’t.

We got there and were greeted by a self-important usher, who told us that the security guy would stamp our hands and our tickets, so we could escape and come back if we wanted to. Then he led us to our home-plate-shaped table in the third row where we took our seats. You’re not facing the field, you are facing the people you came to the game with, which is OK if you want to talk. But if you want to talk, why not stay home or go to a real restaurant? Don’t you come to a ball game to watch the ball game? My seat faced Logan Airport.

The waitress came buy to explain that she would be serving us during the game, which means that she would continue to come by every few minutes, because on the Giant Beer Conglomerate deck, it’s all about the food, not the ballgame that would take place below us. As part of the $115 tickets, the table had a $25 per person food credit to eat up.

We started with a round of beers. No Sam Adams here, this is the Giant Beer Conglomerate deck and your choices are Giant Beer Conglomerate regular, Giant Beer Conglomerate Light, and Giant Beer Conglomerate Lime. My wife and daughters ordered food, but I decided to wait until I was hungry, much to the consternation of our waitress, who came by every few seconds to ask if I was ready to order yet.

After watching several planes land at Logan, I looked back over my left shoulder to see that the game had started! We were then treated to more visits from the waitress and a gentleman selling 50-50 raffle tickets, prompting my daughter to remark, “What is this, the Cape Cod League?”

As for the food, some of it was typical ballpark – Fenway Franks, sausages, peanuts – some of it was not. I opted for an $11.85 club sandwich, which consisted of one layer (aren’t club sandwiches usually two?) of turkey, bacon, lettuce and tomato on toasted white bread. Not real appealing and not worth $11.85, but we had $100 of food to eat, so at least it added to the total. At the end of the night, he waitress made a big production of “time to settle up” and handed us out check for $102. Damn, we went two bucks over! One of the items on the bill was $4 for something called “Blank Classes.” We didn’t remember taking any classes, let alone blank ones, so we asked the waitress, who didn’t know what that was!!! Turns out, they didn’t know what category to put a hot chocolate in, so it ended up in an unnamed (blank) class.

Meanwhile, down on the field, this baseball game kept intruding into all the fun on the roof. Being so far up and so far from home plate, you really don’t feel like you are part of the game, but I couldn’t help noticing that Orioles manager Dave Trembly (who looks like William Shatner’s kid brother) kept changing pitchers. He used three pitchers in the sixth, three more in the seventh, and another in the eighth. Seven pitchers to nine outs. And we think our pitchers can’t go very long.

So, with all the pitching changes, we left after the eighth inning, when the game was already 3½ hours long. But we left with lots to remember about our night on the roof. Mainly, we’ll remember to sit somewhere else next time.

# 100

I started this blog, appropriately, on Truck Day, the psychological start of the baseball season. Now, with the season winding down, I’ve reached post #100. Here are some of the highlights, lowlights, right predictions, wrong predictions and downright stupid things I’ve said in 99 entries.

2/6/09 (Truck Day): “But, here in Boston, the truck better have lots of medical equipment on board. I’ve never seen such a roster of walking wounded.” Right!

2/12/09: 5 reasons the Sox are better than last year

(1) Better starting pitcing – check

(2) Better relief pitching – check

(3) The Rays won’t be as good – check

(4) Fewer distractions in left field – check

(5) Deeper bench – struck out on that one until August

2/22/09: 5 reasons the Sox are worse than last year

(1) The 2009 Yankees are better than the 2008 Yankees – yup

(2) No Coco – wrong. Ellsbury has emerged as a better player

(3) Easy outs at the bottom of the lineup – check

(4) Big Papi may never equal his 54-homer season, but his slide from 54 to 35 to 23 last year in an injury-plagued season is a problem – yes and no

2/22/09: “With so many walking wounded coming off injuries or medical issues last year, or just getting older (Ortiz, Lowell, Baldelli, Kotsay, Drew, Bard, Varitek, Beckett, Wakefield, Penney, Smoltz, Saito) a whole lot has to go right for the Red Sox to contend in 2009.” Some things went right, some not.

2/25/09 “The team thinks that Dice-K is following their program in Japan, but they don’t know for sure.” By April, they knew.

3/6/09 “Even RemDawg is being held back with a mysterious ‘infection that he got while out of the country.’” If we only knew!

3/8/09 “Papelbon clone Daniel Bard pitching the fifth. Goes into the Papelbon stare before he pitches, then hits 99 on the gun. In one sequence he threw two at 97 then the next one at 86 to strike out the batter and prompt my wife to remark that ‘he’s got a good changeup.’ Yup, he sure does.” This is called foreshadowing.

4/3/09 “The team has eight starting pitchers (Beckett, Lester, Dice-K, Wakefield, Penny, Smoltz, and Buccholz and Bowden at Pawtucket). If they can keep any five of them healthy at once, it is the team’s strong suit.” Well, they couldn’t.

Also 4/3/09 on the bullpen: “The sheer numbers mean that nobody will be overworked.” Looked stupid there, but on the other hand I said, “Nick Green appears to be a capable backup, and could be versatile enough to last the season.”

4/8/09 on Varitek: “If he can hit .250, it will be a 30-point improvement over last year.” He can’t and it’s not.

4/13/09: “Was Josh Beckett throwing at Bobby Abreu? I don’t think so. When time has been called and the pitcher is already into his windup, the ball often ends up going high, often to the backstop.” MLB disagreed.

4/15/09: “Dice-K left the game in the first inning last night. The first inning!!! Of course, he did give up five runs and throw 43 pitches in that first inning, but still. How can a pitcher have a tired arm one inning into his second appearance of the season?” And then did it again in pitching for Portland in September. Bookends to a lost year.

4/27/09, as Sox sweep Yankees: “Unfortunately, there is a pattern here that goes back several seasons. The Red Sox sweep the Yankees early in the season, then the Yankees sweep the Sox later in the season.” The pattern continues.

5/5/09: “What is obvious from the weekend is that I was wrong about the Rays (and so was everybody else for that matter). They haven’t slipped back, they are better. Probably the best team in the American League, with great pitching, excellent timely hitting, power that puts the Sox to shame.” And I was wrong about being wrong.

5/18/09: “If you want to get on base, just hit it to the Red Sox shortstop. The Sox have made 24 errors, 11 of them by Nick Green and Julio Lugo.” And so the trade for Alex Gonzalez after three months of this nonsense.

6/3/09 on Jonathan Papelbon: “…he gave up three singles to load the bases then struck out the side to preserve the Sox 5-1 win over Detroit.” Just a typical Pap performance.

6/10/09 on the bullpen: “There really is nobody out there that makes you think, “Oh, no,” when he starts warming up (Oh, no, it’s John Wasdin).” I take that back, “Oh, no, Ramon Ramirez.”

7/3/09: “So, here’s to Tim Wakefield on the occasion of his 383rd start. Every time Kevin Kennedy, Jimy Williams, Joe Kerrigan, Grady Little or Terry Francona has given him the ball, he has given it his all, and more.” Tim has made only three starts since that game.

7/6/09 (midseason review): “A typical Red Sox season seems to be developing. They start strong and build up a small lead. The Yankees start poorly and then go into a surge in mid-June (they have won 12 of their last 13 at this writing) to take the lead in the division. The Red Sox give chase and possibly end up with the Wild Card.” Looking good on that one.

7/17/09: “Here’s hopin’ the August schedule doesn’t kill them. Starting July 31, the Sox play 15 of 19 games on the road, including two at Tampa Bay, four at New York and three in Texas.” 9-9 in the 18 games, but those six straight losses to the Yankees and Rays pretty much consigned them to second place in the division.

8/6/09: “Remember when the Red Sox had a five-game lead in the diviision? They have lost 7 ½ games in the standings since then.” It’s now 12½.

8/29/09: “When all the dust settled at the trading deadline, Terry Francona may have lost a long reliever, but he was given a bench. And he has used that bench to maximum effectiveness.” Still the case.

And now on to post #101 and beyond.

Pitch In or Pitch Out

They lose a couple of games and two guys jump off the Tobin Bridge. Come on, it’s not that bad….YET.

But the way the pitching is going, there could be a line up there soon.

Which brings us to John Farrell, the pitching coach. He’s a very well-respected guy in the game, and has been mentioned as a managerial prospect in places like Pittsburgh. He wisely took himself out of the running for that thankless job and stayed with the Red Sox. But maybe this offseason he will finally get that manager’s job. We can only hope.

Farrell came to the Sox from the Indians’ front office. He had never been a pitching coach at the major league level. Nor at the minor league level for that matter. Here’s his bio from redsox.com:

After his retirement as an active player, spent 5 seasons from 1997-2001 as Assistant Coach/Pitching & Recruiting Coordinator at Oklahoma State University, completing his bachelors degree at OSU in 1996...With the Cowboys, instilled new disciplines and methods into the program and mentored 14 pitchers that were drafted or signed as non-drafted free agents at the professional level, including 1999 National League Rookie of the Year Scott Williamson. Prior to 2007, Farrell served as the Cleveland Indians Director of Player Development since November 2001.

All very nice. And in two previous seasons on the Boston bench the pitching has been pretty good – ERA around 4, which is one of the best in baseball. But we’ve found out that Farrell has a major flaw: He can’t see and correct pitching problems.

Case #1: John Smoltz
After posting a 2-5 record here with an 8.33 ERA, Smoltz moved on to St. Louis, where he has become the Atlanta version of John Smoltz again, striking out 21 in 17 innings. It seems that Cardinals pitcher Chris Carpenter noticed that Smoltz was tipping his pitches. A minor correction has made the difference and now Smoltz is helping the Cards toward the NL Central title while Boston has Paul Byrd in place of Smoltz.

Case #2: Brad Penny
Ten horrible starts in a row led to his demise in Boston. Then he goes to the Giants and pitches eight shutout innings. The difference? Well, remember in his last start here against the Yankees, RemDawg pointed out that Penny was just firing fastballs up there and the Yankees were geared up for them? The Giants got him to throw more breaking balls and it worked.

Case #3: Daisuke Matsuzaka
True, the World Baseball Classic screwed him up big time, but there were mechanical issues there too, and his continual nibbling around the plate and inability or refusal to go after hitters. Maybe Dice-K’s stubbornness and refusal to do things any other way than his own contributes, but there has never been a connection between the team pitching philosophy, as implemented by Farrell, and the pitcher. Seems like more could be done here to get everybody on the same page.

Case #4: Ramon Ramirez and Manny Delcarmen
Since August, Ramirez has melted down in about two of every three relief appearances. And when Ramirez doesn’t meld down, Delcarmen does. Why can’t there be some consistency there? And as for Delcarmen, he has never developed into the setup guy he was always expected to be. With his stuff, his record should be better.

Case #5: Josh Beckett
You want to talk about inconsistent, here’s another case where the player is having problems and the pitching coach can’t do anything about it. The Sox “ace” is in free fall at the most important time of the regular season. If this is a physical problem, well, there isn’t much a pitching coach can do about that. But if it is a mechanical problem that is leading to home runs flying out at an alarming rate, then the pitching coach should be able to do something about it. But, given his track record, Farrell probably can’t.

In short, John Farrell is a good pitching coach when things are going well. But every pitching coach is a good pitching coach when things are going well. The outstanding pitching coaches earn their keep by fixing things that go wrong. And Farrell has shown no ability to be that fixer, or to bring a young pitcher to the next level. Maybe it’s time for him to accept one of those managerial jobs over the winter. Case closed.

Patterns

When you watch enough baseball, you start to notice patterns.

For example, when Ramon Ramirez and Manny Delcarmen come into a game back to back, one of them will melt down. Usually it is Ramirez, who has become about as reliable as that other guy named Ramirez that we used to have.

And if you are watching the game on NESN, you will notice the Dave Roberts pattern: whatever Don Orsillo says, Dave Robert repeats. Don says, “Great catch there by Jacoby Ellsbury.” Dave says, “Jacoby Ellsbury made a great catch there.”

In the games against the Rays this week, the pattern developed that Joe Madden couldn’t keep his ass on the bench and had to come out to change pitchers three times an inning. No wonder the games ran close to four hours. Instead of fining Jonathan Papelbon for taking longer than 2:25 to get ready (that’s two minutes and 25 seconds. It only seems like two hours and 25 minutes), MLB should institute a rule that a reliever coming into a game must pitch to a minimum of three batters or finish the inning. That would likely eliminate two of Joe Madden’s pitching changes and save nearly five minutes of down time. While they’re at it, make the pitchers stay on the mound and stop walking around the infield rubbing the ball after every pitch. When you have a 40-pitch inning and you have to walk around in circles after every one, the inning is excruciating, Dice-K.

Oh, and where were all the “wonderful, loud and enthusiastic” Rays fans that everybody talked about in the playoffs last year, packing the Trop with their cowbells? The total attendance for three games was about enough to fill the place once. Apparently, in Tampa Bay, success breeds apathy. With this year’s edition of the Rays stuck in third place in both the AL East and the Wild Card, the fans have gone back into the woodwork and it’s more like the old days there. Next thing you know, they’ll start calling themselves the Devil Rays again and that crazy guy that used to sit behind the plate and yell at the players will be back.

Look at this as another pattern. Cinderella teams like the 2008 Rays usually slip back the next season. Sometimes it’s because the season was a fluke. The 2007 Colorado Rockies put together that incredible winning streak at the end of the season and rode it into the World Series. The next year they were 74-88, and when they started 2009 18-28, manager Clint Hurdle was fired. The 1969 Miracle Mets followed their World Series win over the Orioles with three consecutive 83-win third-place finishes before returning to the Series in 1973 (ironically after winning only 82 games in that regular season).

The 1967 Impossible Dream Red Sox also followed the slip-back pattern, finishing fourth in 1968 as Cy Young winner Jim Lonborg broke his leg skiing and went from 22 wins to six, Tony Conigliaro continued to recover from being beaned and Fireball Fred Wenz was one of their bullpen options. At least the Sox managed to stay above .500 for the next 15 seasons, although they only made the post-season once during that period.

This year’s Sox team is also following a pattern that has happened several times over the last few seasons. Boston starts out strong, builds a lead in the division, and gradually blows the lead as the Yankees overtake them somewhere around the beginning of July. The Sox then end up as the Wild Card team. If you think about it, the same pattern happened in 2007, even though the Sox won the AL East that year. The difference was that the Sox’ 11 ½ game lead was too great for New York to overcome, and the Yankees finished two games back. If the season had gone on for another week, the Sox likely would have finished second.

This season is following the old pattern for Boston. Early lead, start to stumble, get swept by the Yankees in a four or five game series, lose the lead, fight for the Wild Card.

With a month to go in the season, the fight is on. Taking two of three this week in St. Pete has given the Sox an edge and pushed the Rays to the edge.

Pitching In

I had my last chance to see this year’s Portland SeaDogs on Monday night playing in Manchester, N.H., against the Fisher Cats. I was very lucky to miss Dice-K and his 49-pitch first inning the day before, but they were handing out pictures of Matsuzaka throwing in the game. I think it was pitch number 44.

The hitting star for the SeaDogs was shortstop Yamaico Navarro, a recent callup from A-ball when Argenis Diaz was traded to Pittsburgh as part of the Adam LaRoche-for-a-week deal. Hitting a robust .159, Navarro nevertheless drove in the tying and winning runs and later scored an insurance run in the ninth inning, when Portland came out of its game-long trance to score four times.

The SeaDogs started a good-looking righthander named Ryne Miller, who could someday be the third Ryne in the big leagues after Ryne Duren and Ryne Sandberg. Miller pitched five innings of one-hit ball, then gave up a one-out single in the sixth and struck out the next batter. His line: 5 2/3 innings pitched, no runs, two hits, seven strikeouts. That earned him a trip to the showers IN THE SIXTH INNING!!!! Why? Because he reached his pitch count, whatever it was. Couldn’t have been much, though.

Out from the bullpen jogged reliever Tommy Hottovy, just up recently from Lowell, who pitched to a total of seven batters before he was pulled in the middle of the eighth inning.

When he came out, Derrick Loop came in. A tall right-hander who had 16 saves at Salem in the Carolina League, Loop pitched to three batters and left after getting the first out in the ninth on a strikeout. Why not leave him in to finish the game? But of course not! The SeaDogs brought in Bryce Cox, who nearly blew the game giving up two singles and a walk to load the bases with one out. A game-ending double play bailed him out.

The way the pitching was handled in this game is precisely why the Red Sox have the perpetual problem of short outings. Starting pitchers have trouble getting out of the sixth inning and relievers can only pitch one inning at a time at Double-A. It is drilled into them from the low minors to the majors that they just can’t throw too many pitches.

The Sox need to let their pitchers grow up looking at ways they can get batters out instead of looking over their shoulders for the manager and his short leash.