A nice start, but...

In today's Boston Globe Nick Cafardo states that:

"While it's obviously too soon to tell whether this is a team built to win close, low-scoring games, after going 3-22 last season when scoring two or fewer runs, the early trend is encouraging."

He really should have concentrated on the "too soon" bit...

Year	G	W	L	%
2006	2	2	0	1.000
2005	25	3	22	0.120
2004	24	4	20	0.167
2003	32	5	27	0.156
2002	37	4	33	0.108
2001	44	3	41	0.068

Anyone want to take the bet that the Sox might regress to the mean a little bit as the season progresses? Teams that score 2 runs or fewer, don't tend to win the game they are playing - in 2004* for example, the MLB season consisted of 2,428 games - one of the teams scored 2 or fewer runs in 1,275 of those games (52.5%)... the winning percentage of those teams? .115...

What is impressive, is that since the Theo regime was established, the Sox have cut down the number of instances where they are scoring 2 or fewer runs - again using the 2004 data (2005 data doesn't seem to be available yet), the Sox led the league in fewest games for a team scoring 2 runs or less - not surprising given that the team led the league in runs scored - the then Montreal Expos 'led' the league with 65 such games in '04... winning 9 of them... ouch!

It is encouraging to see the Sox win two, 2-1 games so early in the season, but let's hope that we don't spend much more time talking about an offense that generates 2 runs a game.

* The underlying information was collated at Retrosheet.