Sox season so far - the 20 game edition

Well 20 games in to the season seems as good a place as any to have my first review of the Sox season to date.

Year	20 Game Record	1 Run Record	Season
2005	11-9	1-5
2004	14-6	2-1	98-64
2003	14-6	6-1	95-67
2002	14-6	2-1	93-69
2001	14-6	1-5	82-79
2000	11-9	2-4	85-77

So what does this tell us about the season ahead – pretty much nothing would be my educated guess. If we repeat our last 11-9 start, we should start preparing early for autumn!

The Sox have had reasonable pitching – a team ERA of 3.87 is the best in the AL East (6^th in the AL, 12^th in the ML) – the only three pitchers we have who are significantly over that number are Schilling, Wells and Blaine Neal, two of whom we can reasonably expect to improve, the other who you would think is vulnerable when Miller comes off the DL (unless Wells or Mantei’s twists are more serious than they looked last night). On the hitting side, the Sox are second (in both the AL and ML) in runs scored, behind the current Baltimore behemoth, and toward the top in all the hitting categories – but that hides the relative under-performance of Millar, Bellhorn and Edgar Renteria.

The reason for the table is more to bring out the Sox record in 1 run games – I think at this early stage of the season it is too easy to read too much into ‘significant’ events in small sample sizes. Three of those one run losses came after the Sox had clawed there way back to even in the top of the 9^th, only to lose the games in excruciating fashion in the bottom half – and the memory of those comeback losses is probably my prevailing view of the season to date.

One other point to make at this stage – I appreciate that the unbalanced schedule does make schedule quirks inevitable, but I really do dislike the fact that we have played 6 games against the Devil Rays so far… and won’t see them again until after the A-S game, that we will play the Orioles 12 times before the break, and only 6 after, and that schedulers continue to create schedules where teams see each other in back to back weeks, where the pitching match-ups are identical in the second set of games – in the last week, Kazmir / Wakefield, Chen / Wells, Lopez / Clement, and then starting May 6^th, back to back sets against the Mariners and Athletics on each coast – if you are unlucky enough to play a team when it is hot during that spell… tough luck!