Somethin's Burnin'

Sporting Goods

So I unfortunately caught a bit of Jim Rome on ESPN News two nights ago, in which his general rant was "The Sox aren't playing well, are they underperforming? No. They let two of their top pitchers get away, and 3/5 of their starting rotation is new. Maybe Theo isn't so smart after all, blah blah blah."

Yes, I will concede that the Sox let one great and one good pitcher go. But lost in the need to make that tired point is the fact that they actually replaced them with the pitcher who has been their best this year (Clement) and two guys who have had some bad starts, but have been good overall (Wells and Miller).

Turns out that because of injuries, the 3 new Sox have basically pitched 8 more innings that Pedro and Lowe. After you adjust for that, looking at Value Over Replacement Players, long story short the Sox could have saved about 15 more runs this year if they had Pedro and Lowe instead of the newcomers. With the Sox offense, that is worth about 1.4 wins to this point this year.

So Rome is either saying that giving up 1.4 wins from your starting rotation in order to save millions of dollars that allows for other signings (including resigning Varitek, arguably the team MVP right now) makes Theo a failure, or he is blaming him for Schilling's injury. Either way, as fun as it is to look at Pedro and think what might have been, it is not as if he was replaced with Danny Darwin or Matt Young.