The Red Sox and their bullpen
Posted on June 10, 2008
Filed Under 2008 Season, Baseball Miscellaneous | 1 Comment
There are a LOT of reasons that the Red Sox won the World Series last year but the biggest had to do with the complete dominance of their bullpen.
In 2007, Boston had the second best bullpen in the majors with a combined ERA of 3.10 and roughly a 2.2 K/BB ratio. If you think that’s good, you should have seen what the numbers looked like before Eric Gagne got brought into the equation and Hideki Okajima’s arm started getting tired near the end of the season. Lets just say that if the Sox had the lead by the 7th, the game usually ended that way.
By comparison, in 2006 when the Red Sox blew a huge divisional lead and missed the playoffs for the first time in 4 years, their bullpen had a 4.51 ERA. That was good enough to get the pen ranked 9th worst in the entire MLB. Yes, it is not completely fair to blame the bullpen for the collapse that year because they were forced to work almost 50 more innings than in 2007, but that excuse only gets you so far.
Relievers tend to be the most inconsistent of all baseball players (that is another article for another time). It’s because of this that most Red Sox fans became very concerned when the pen started this season so badly, but there IS good news on the horizon as they seem to have turned it around.
The pen has only allowed 7 runs in their last 39 1/3 innings. Their ERA over the last 39 games is a tidy 2.80 and their ERA for the season has been lowered to 3.86.
Nothing like a bit of sunshine through the clouds.
Comments
One Response to “The Red Sox and their bullpen”
Leave a Reply
Well then, after watching last night’s game I feel like a jinx. This will be the last time I ever write a post about how proud I am of our pitching!