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This is it. 8.5 games behind, 3 games against the division leader over the weekend, and the best chance to climb back into the race in the balance. Fortunately, the pitching matchups are highly favorable.
Schilling should beat Lieber. Arroyo, who is significantly better than his 3-7 would indicate, ought to beat the journeyman Sturtze. Note the insane 55:41 run:earned run ratio that Arroyo labors under. Go, Red Sox defense! Lowe vs. Contreras... well, that'll be entertaining. I'm predicting an 8-7 game. In the third inning.
Mind you, Derek Lowe has an 87:66 run:earned run ratio. Yeesh. OK, I fired up the spreadsheet; read the extended cut for the bottom 15 R:ER ratios for pitchers who've gone over 20 innings. Hint: Red Sox pitchers are well represented, particularly if you filter for larger sample sizes. As much as Lowe was helped by great run production last year, he's been hurt by lousy defense this year. The real Lowe underneath all the effects of the players around him is still not that good, though.
Anyhow, the point of all this before I got distracted by the lousy Red Sox defense was that I would like to believe that this is the point at which I stop expecting the Sox to do anything this year. That'll fall by the wayside if they make it to the playoffs, but I'd like to believe it right now. If they don't sweep the Yankees this weekend -- and they need to sweep -- then I think they should trade Nomar for prospects; they should sluff Lowe off; and they should think long and hard about Varitek: if they aren't gonna win this year, and he wants a long-term contract, and they expect Shoppach to be ready the year after next, then they should trade Varitek and rent someone passable for next year to hold down the fort until Shoppach is ready. I wouldn't feel that way if Varitek was represented by anyone but Scott Boras, but he is and I do.
(Dig those extended sentences? I can reel 'em off all week.)
This obsession with always contending gets in the way of building a perennial contender; it may at this juncture be necessary to take a step back. There are a huge number of teams who still think they have a chance and there are not a lot of great players on the market. If the Sox' chances are poor this year, and they are, and if they can improve their chances in future years at the cost of whatever remaining chance they have this year... they should make trades. Screw the fellowship of the miserable.
More...
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.....Okay not really. But still, what is it with baseball and statistics? Would the game even exist without statistics?
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Baseball, more than any other popular US sport, is a series of discrete events. You just can't stat basketball or football or hockey as easily. Course, the seeming ease of baseball stats means that sometimes we get the wrong idea, but that's what Bill James is all about. For example, it's entirely possible that my simplistic R/ER stat is fatally flawed... it looks good but I haven't bothered to chart it against team performance in any way, so who knows if it has predictive value.
Fuck. And now I'm going to wind up spending all weekend doing exactly that.
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As far as runs scored and allowed go, the Red Sox should be even with or just ahead of the Yankees, so there's still hope, but 8½ games is a hell of a lot to make up in 2 months.
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And yeah; there's hope, but the margin is very big. I can believe in a 5.5 game pickup, but I cannot find it in me to believe in a 7.5 game pickup.
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It's already late July, and you're not past that point yet? Must be a comparatively good year for the Sox.;-)
Then again, my perspective may be skewed. I was a Mets fan in the early 80s.