The Bruins season is over and that means that I turn my eyes back to Fenway Park. It is kind of hard not to actually, I live across from the thing, but so it goes.
Mired on the Bruins beat as I was for the last half of the season, I could not help but start to think about some correlations between what I saw from the spoked B’s in January through March to what we have seen come out of the Fens in the first month-and-a-half of the Major League Baseball season.Two teams, beloved by the people, incredibly inconsistent and frustrating. Both came into their years with high expectations (run prevention and projection adding “another eight to nine wins” is simply not going to happen), both have trouble scoring at times and are dealing with low return on investment and injury.
The historic collapse of the Bruins notwithstanding, both teams are probably better than they have looked. Yes, the Flyers just ripped the heart out of the Hub, but the Black and Gold did deliver a second consecutive conference semifinals appearance to Causeway Street and that was not entirely a fluke.
So, I got to thinking about recent Sox history. I thought to myself: ‘haven’t we seen some frustrating starts in recent years only to come back and win 95 games?” Then I went to the numbers. Here are the May 15th runs scored, allowed and projected win-loss since 2004.
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
It is interesting to note that, through one extra game in 2004, the Sox had scored the same amount of runs as the 2010 team. The 2004 team was also considered to be atrocious in the field and wildly inconsistent from the middle of May until the end of July. Yes, Pedro Martinez and Curt Schilling were the anchors of that staff and they are both potential Hall of Fame pitchers in the 3000 strikeout club, but the 2004 Sox were not known as a “run prevention type of team.”
The 2010 Sox are not an atrocious fielding team and will be better when Jacoby Ellsbury and Mike Cameron come back. At a 6.5 UZR (though only a 3.8 UZR/150), they are in the top third in the league in fielding even if they are not the dominant glove team that pundits had predicted.
This season, purely by these base numbers, looks a lot like the 2009 Sox. They are missing some pop but as was pointed out at Fire Brand earlier this week, it is not like they are in the middle of the pack in total offense.
So, really what it comes down to is pitching. Would anybody have guessed that through the first month or so that the Sox staff would actually be the part of the team that has let the franchise down? They have performed, by runs allowed basis, about .5 of a win poorer than last year and are the only team since the 2004 World Series winner to post a negative run differential in the middle of May.
Say what you will about the offense. It has not performed to these historical standards though after June 1 of 2009 Jon Lester and Josh Beckett went on a roll that carried the team back to the expected 95 win plateau. A semblance of the pitching from last year with the same level of offensive production could put this team near the 90-win mark or above, depending on the breaks either way throughout the year.