2010 Red Sox Projections - Starters

This is post eleven in a series of posts previewing the 2010 Red Sox.

2009 vs. 2010 Red Sox - Starting Pitchers:
2009 - Josh Beckett, Jon Lester, Daisuke Matsuzaka, Tim Wakefield, Brad Penny, John Smoltz, Clay Buchholz
2010 - Jon Lester, Josh Beckett, John Lackey, Daisuke Matsuzaka, Clay Buchholz

During the 2008-2009 offseason, a couple things happened that ended up inflating the Red Sox runs allowed totals in 2009. They added two veteran pitchers, Brad Penny and John Smoltz, on short-term, mid-money contracts. And the World Baseball Classic tournament was played for the second time.

Jon Lester and Josh Beckett both started slowly, and then, early in May, started pitching like aces. Beckett had a poor stretch in late-August and September, but Lester was one of the best pitchers in baseball for the last five months of the season. Lester, in particular, seemed to be hurt by the defense early, and he "adjusted" to that weakness, raising his strike out rates. Beckett seemed to have an issue with adjusting to a new catcher, as his slump coincided with Victor Martinez' arrival, but whether that's causation or just correlation is unknowable. He did seem to have adjusted by the end of the season.

Penny threw some decent games, but a lot of not-so-decent ones as well, before getting cut in August. The Smoltz experiment didn't work that well, as he got hit early and often. He ended up giving up 37 runs in 40 innings over 8 starts, including 5+ runs in six of the eight before he was cut.

The World Baseball Classic ended up costing them most of the Daisuke Matsuzaka's season. He is far more emotionally invested in that tournament than the Red Sox team is, overthrew early, didn't go through a proper spring training, and end up starting the season hurt and not in condition for the 162 game season. We cannot ignore that 2009 happened, but sometimes the ancillary factors are glaring. Everyone agrees that Matsuzaka was injured and out of shape, and there's no reason to expect that his early 2009 performance tells us anything particularly useful, or more useful than his late 2009 performance, about his potential 2010 performance.

Tim Wakefield pitched pretty well through the first half of the season, earning (well, not really earning, but being selected for) a spot on the 2009 AL All Star team. Due to injuries, however, he made only four generally ineffective starts after the All Star break. Clay Buchholz demonstrated that he's ready to pitch consistently in the Major Leagues.

Here are the 2009 numbers:

Red Sox 2010 projected at-bats

	GS	CG	GF	W	L	Sho	IP	H	R	ER	HR	BB	K	HBP	BK	WP	ERA	WHIP	K/9	K/BB
Jon Lester	32	2	0	15	8	0	203 1/3	186	80	77	20	64	225	3	0	6	3.41	1.23	9.96	3.52
Josh Beckett	32	4	0	17	6	2	212 1/3	198	99	91	25	55	199	7	1	3	3.86	1.19	8.43	3.62
Clay Buchholz	16	0	0	7	4	0	92	91	44	43	13	36	68	2	0	1	4.21	1.38	6.65	1.89
Justin Masterson	6	0	0	2	2	0	35 1/3	38	18	18	3	13	28	4	0	0	4.58	1.44	7.13	2.15
Tim Wakefield	21	2	0	11	5	0	129 2/3	137	67	66	12	50	72	10	0	4	4.58	1.44	5.00	1.44
Brad Penny	24	0	0	7	8	0	131 2/3	160	89	82	17	42	89	5	0	4	5.61	1.53	6.08	2.12
Daisuke Matsuzaka	12	0	0	4	6	0	59 1/3	81	38	38	10	30	54	2	0	8	5.76	1.87	8.19	1.80
Paul Byrd	6	0	0	1	3	0	31	44	20	20	3	11	10	0	0	0	5.81	1.77	2.90	.91
Junichi Tazawa	4	0	0	2	2	0	20	32	16	14	3	8	10	3	0	0	6.30	2.00	4.50	1.25
John Smoltz	8	0	0	2	5	0	40	59	37	37	8	9	33	3	0	0	8.33	1.70	7.43	3.67
Michael Bowden	1	0	0	0	1	0	3	7	7	7	2	1	3	0	0	0	21.00	2.67	9.00	3.00

Of note:

• They gave 38 starts to three pitchers (Penny, Byrd, Smoltz) who posted a cumulative 6.17 ERA and are no longer with the organization.
• Matsuzaka's performance was awful in 8 games before his DL-extended Spring Training stint. In four games after returning, he threw six-plus innings per start and put up an ERA of 2.22.
• Everything about Jon Lester's line, the innings, the ERA, the WHIP, the strikeouts and walks, screams "Ace." And that's despite the fact that he put up a 6.51 ERA in his first eight games.
• Clay Buchholz looks like he's ready to be an effective Major League starter.

During this offseason, they added the best pitcher from the LAnaheim Angels, John Lackey.

So the starter projections:

Marcel:

Red Sox 2010 projected starters (marcel)

	GS	CG	GF	W	L	Sho	IP	H	R	ER	HR	BB	K	HBP	BK	WP	ERA	WHIP	K/9	K/BB
Jon Lester				13	7		182	171	76	72	18	60	170	5	0	5	3.56	1.27	8.41	2.83
Josh Beckett				14	8		184	178	86	81	21	48	171	7	1	4	3.96	1.23	8.36	3.56
John Lackey				11	7		165	166	77	70	20	46	130	8	0	6	3.82	1.28	7.09	2.83
Daisuke Matsuzaka				13	10		177	174	85	83	22	83	160	7	0	8	4.22	1.45	8.14	1.93
Clay Buchholz				7	7		112	115	63	59	15	46	92	3	0	3	4.74	1.44	7.39	2.00
Total				58	39		820	804	387	365	96	283	723	30	1	26	4.01	1.33	7.94	2.55

PECOTA:

Red Sox 2010 projected starters (PECOTA)

	GS	CG	GF	W	L		Sho	IP	H	R	ER	HR	BB	K	HBP	BK	WP	ERA	WHIP	K/9	K/BB
Josh Beckett	31			14	8	0		195.82	182	81	77	20	49	170				3.52	1.18	7.83	3.51
Clay Buchholz	29			12	7	0		164.82	145	72	68	18	62	141				3.71	1.26	7.68	2.27
John Lackey	31			14	8	0		199.69	188	83	79	22	52	144				3.55	1.20	6.47	2.74
Jon Lester	31			12	8	0		178.50	168	76	73	18	62	140				3.66	1.29	7.05	2.27
Daisuke Matsuzaka	30			18	13	0		177.30	172	91	86	22	86	152				4.37	1.46	7.72	1.77
Total	151			70	44			916.13	855	403	383	100	311	747				4.37	1.46	7.72	1.77

Both marcel and PECOTA think that Daisuke Matsuzaka will be down around 100 IP. I disagree, as discussed above, and have bumped him back up to around 176.

The Red Sox got 957 innings from their starts in 2009, and 515 runs allowed. I expect the innings number to go up, so I'm going to scale the projections to get to 975.

Marcel has these five pitchers at 820 innings, which means that I need to account for another 155 innings. Those "extra innings" have to go to, presumably, worse pitchers. (I suspect that Marcel is way off on how many innings, for example, Clay Buchholz will pitch.) But I'm going to assume that they get 155 innings in 30 or so starts from pitchers allowing 6 runs per 9 IP. (Not earned runs, just runs. That's a fairly high number, but I'm trying to do a reasonably conservative projection.) That works out to 103 additional runs allowed, on top of the 387 that marcel already projects, and brings the starting staff out to 490 runs in 975 innings. That's a 25 run improvement over last year from the starters, and I think that's extremely conservative.

PECOTA has these five pitchers at 915 innings, which means I need to add another 60. At 6 R per 9 IP, that's an additional 40 runs over the 403 which PECOTA already projects, or 443 runs over 975 innings. That's an improvement of 72 runs over last year's starters, and I think it is much likelier than marcel's improvement, particularly as none of these projections are "pricing in" the expected defensive upgrades.

Bottom Line: I expect the starters to give up fewer runs, in more innings, than the 2009 starters did. The starters who were terrible last year are either gone or fixed. The defense behind them makes everything work a little bit better, too. Net big improvement.



Previous entries:
Introduction
Catcher
1B
2B
3B
SS
LF
CF
RF
DH