Sox season so far - April

Well April ends on a down note after a fast start - a 3-6 road trip to close out the first 25 games.

Here is how things stand at close of AL East play on April 30;

	W	L	%	GB
NYY	13	10	.565
BOS	14	11	.560
TOR	12	11	.522	1
BAL	13	13	.500	1½
TAM	11	14	.440	3

On the back of a (in game) predictable loss today, the Sox fall behind the Yanks by percentage points.

How are the Sox doing?

Team Hitting:

		Rank
		AL	ML
R	113	9	17
HR	23	10	20
BB	118	1	1
K	154	6	13
BA	.258	9	20
OBP	.353	5	8
SLG	.416	9	22

I think we had steeled ourselves for the offense to be slightly off from 2005, but perhaps not quite this off. In 23 games last April (25 this year) the Sox had scored 130 runs - that is over a run a game more.

There have been successes - Youkilis has been all that we should have hoped for (a .299 / .416 / .820 line) having been promoted to lead off, Mike Lowell has not been the offensive hole that he could have been (.318 / .371 / .882), while David Ortiz has contributed 10HR, 20RBI and a .278 / .391 / 1.030 line.

Equally we have gotten less than we would have expected out of Varitek, and a lot less than we had hoped for out of Loretta, while Manny's power numbers are so far off usual, you have to expect his recent revival to continue, while sadly, our hopes for Coco Crisp have been derailed by a hand injury that has already cost us 20 games.

It just seems that we have gotten used to a team that brings runners home, that punishes weak starters, that patiently gets to the bullpen... and we are not seeing that with the same consistency that we have been accustomed to - in 2005, the Sox had failed to score more than 3 runs in 8 games by this point in the season - this year... 10 - really not a big difference, it just seems that way I guess.

In an earler post I mentioned that the Sox media were getting a little excited about the Sox record in low scoring games - declaring the Sox better prepared to win these games. Since then (April 9th) the Sox have gone 2-6 in games when they score 3 or less - as I said then, I will say now... teams that score 3 runs or less don't win many games.

Team Pitching:

		Rank
		AL	ML
ERA	4.63	5	16
WHIP	1.35	4	10
BB	69	6	7
SO	156	3	10
K/9	6.86	3	9
K/BB	2.38	3	3

In the same way that we expected the hitting to be slightly off, we expected the pitching staff to be better... and if you had asked before this road trip started, we all would have agreed that, in the main, it has been a lot better than expected.

Those early low scoring wins helped that perception early, but the major question marks coming into the season were Schilling and Foulke - Schilling has been as good as we have ever seen him in a Red Sox shirt, while Foulke, after a shaky first game, has been so good that large sections of the blogging community (ok, it's just me) are campaigning to have him restored to the closer's role so that Papelbon can give us 180 innings rather than 60.

Given that we can't ignore this last road trip, our pitching is best described as ok - and that is not necessarily a criticism - at this stage last year our pitching looked even better, but the question marks that did exist hadn't really fully worked there way out - indeed in that post I remarked how Schilling was a sure thing to improve from his early numbers...

I really do think we need to look at moving Papelbon into the rotation, but our staff shouldn't have many spells like this where ok pitching only receives ok run support on a consistent basis.