Sox season so far - the 60 game edition

Well another 20 games, and a very disappointing 8-12 record over those games, in an admittedly tough stretch of our schedule.

I guess like any Sox fan I would say it is the manner of some of those defeats, rather than the actual results that have been disappointing - swept by the Blue Jays, a couple of poor losses to the O's, and some terrible performances against the Cardinals and now Cubs - the only real highlights (sorry Neil) were the victories in the Bronx and David Ortiz's walk off shot against the Birds.

There isn't a huge amount of positive news from those 20 games - the following table sets out the performance of the hitters and pitchers - setting out the season BA, OBP and OPS of the hitters, the ERA, WHIP and BAA (batting average against) of the pitchers - the final column sets out the cumulative performance in these categories against the teams career numbers - where a positive result means they are outperforming career numbers, and a negative...:

	BA	OBP	OPS	v. Career
Varitek	0.323	0.389	0.959	47.7%
Ortiz	0.298	0.380	0.955	19.8%
Nixon	0.291	0.385	0.865	8.8%
Damon	0.338	0.389	0.830	33.0%
Ramirez	0.249	0.342	0.810	-55.9%
Mueller	0.270	0.390	0.758	-7.7%
Bellhorn	0.249	0.361	0.739	1.3%
Millar	0.259	0.344	0.722	-31.0%
Renteria	0.270	0.314	0.701	-20.8%
	ERA	WHIP	BAA
Clement	3.79	1.36	0.256	8.4%
Arroyo	4.54	1.25	0.265	11.2%
Miller	5.03	1.40	0.265	-43.3%
Wells	5.07	1.24	0.296	-36.2%
Wakefield	5.13	1.59	0.280	-43.8%
Schilling	8.15	1.81	0.372	-261.9%
Timlin	1.55	1.17	0.252	62.3%
Myers	2.19	1.22	0.261	64.8%
Mantei	5.66	1.65	0.250	-79.5%
Foulke	5.79	1.50	0.283	-158.5%
Halama	6.03	1.34	0.280	-21.9%
Embree	7.00	1.44	0.290	-79.9%

There are quite a few horrible numbers in there - Manny's continuing slump now seems something more, while Kevin Millar just looks lost at the plate. However the team is still in the top 5 in the majors in all the hitting categories you would care about.

Clearly, many of our problems would be solved by a pitching staff that could, you know, pitch! Tossing aside Schilling's numbers, some of those numbers, and performance relative to career numbers, are simply shocking. You could probably live with the starting rotation - Clement has pitched well, Arroyo had pitched well until his suspension, Wells has looked good since his return from the DL, Miller has looked ok, and is probably pitching ahead of anything we could rightfully expect at this point in the season. Wakefield has looked poor for quite a stretch - but a generous fan would note the correlation between his poor stretch and Mirabelli's absence. Did someone say that glass is half full?

Our bullpen...

I don't think it needs much analysis - they simply have to pitch better, or we need significant help. When Schilling returns, we can still expect one of Arroyo or Wakefield to move into the long spot that might mean the end of John Halama's time in the bullpen, but it is not as if Halama is the source of the problem, too many of these guys are underperforming, or are revealing that they may no longer be reliable options in our pen. Given the resources that the Sox have at hand, these should be fixable issues, although bullpen problems are notoriously difficult to solve, at least in the longer term, when performance can change so much year to year.

As you might expect, I am not alone in making these observations - thankfully the man that matters most in these matters has started to make public his concerns on the pitching staff;

• "This is difficult to fix, to be honest with you, so many people are performing below our expectations and below our projections that this isn't easy to fix. If this is the best that this pitching staff can pitch, then I really miscalculated and it's time for changes." Boston Herald

• ''It's obvious we need help with our pitching," Boston Globe
  

20 games ago I suggested the team had issues - and now 20 games later, 60 games in to the 2005 season, Theo has to start looking creatively at how they can be addressed.