Defensive Indifference

Curt Schilling re-signing with the Red Sox creates an interesting — and welcome — quandary for the defending champs. They’ve now got six arms capable of being above average major league starters — Scythehands Voxslayer himself, Josh Beckett, Daisuke Matsuzaka, Tim Wakefield, Jon Lester and Clay Buchholz.

Re-signing Scythehands was simply the smart thing to do, especially for a team with a lot of money. You need to stockpile starting pitchers — and not just because they kick ass at Everquest 2. Boston learned that the hard way in 2005 when they dealt Bronson Arroyo from a supposed position of strength. Ditto for the Phillies this year, who lost Freddy Garcia and Jon Lieber to injury and Brett Myers to the bullpen.

The question now becomes how do the Red Sox find innings for all these pitchers. GM Theo Epstein says they’re considering a six-man rotation:

“We’ve discussed that concept, the concept of a six-man rotation,” Epstein said. “I think it’s premature to commit to any usage pattern, but certainly we’re in a bit of a unique situation where you’d say a number of our starters might benefit from something like that in one way or another. But there’s just so much attrition in baseball that the minute we start counting on having a six-man rotation or give it serious consideration, that’s when we lose a pitcher or two in Spring Training and we look for someone to step up.”

Epstein can’t seriously think a strict six-man rotation is a good idea. We all know the Red Sox are a sabermetrically-inclined organization, and the trend in the world of stat geeks is to have less pitchers, like say four, in your rotation not more. The logic is obvious … you want your best pitchers gobbling up as many innings as possible. A six-man rotation would take starts away from Beckett and that’s the last thing you want to do, since he proved in the playoffs that he’s the lovechild of Bruce Wayne and Alba, except he can throw 98 mph and snap off a 12-to-6 curveball that’s 20 mph lower.

Granted, this will probably be a non-issue because Schilling and Wakefield are old and Lester and Buchholz are young. You probably can’t count on any of those four for more than 180 innings. Still, it’s odd for the Red Sox to potentially embrace an idea that goes so far against sabermetric canon.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 7th, 2007 at 9:53 pm and is filed under Six-man rotation, Sabermetrics, Red Sox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.