Don’t Blame the Red Sox Trouble All On the Starters

A lot has been made of the Red Sox inability to win games after they spent $245 million this offseason on a bunch of hitters and middle-of-the-rotation starters. The Red Sox were unable to sign Jon Lester, and they made almost no effort to replace him in the rotation. Things have come to a front after Koji Uehara blew a save on Sunday to end a six-loss road trip at the hands of the Twins and Rangers.

With no defined ace in the squad, the Red Sox starting pitching has come under fire. In fact only the Blue Jays have a worse team ERA in the AL.[1] The pitcher from the Red Sox opening day roster with the lowest ERA is Clay Buchholz at an unsavory 4.33 and Justin Masterson’s is the worst at 6.37. The Sox won’t even sniff the playoffs if they don’t sort out their pitching situation, but I think the Red Sox starting pitchers have come under an unfair amount of criticism.

The Red Sox starting pitchers have had some horrendous outings, but despite their heinous ERAs the Sox starters have managed to put together 24 quality starts, a mark equal to the average in the AL and just one below the MLB average. Obviously quality starts are not a perfect metric for starting pitching, but considering the pre-season expectations for the Sox starting pitchers, being league average in keeping the team in the game (the basic idea behind quality starts) is not so bad.

In games where the Red Sox starter throws a quality start, the Sox are 14-10 (58%). Based on stats from all the quality starts from 1947-2006 the average team wins quality starts 67% of the time. At the current rate, the Red Sox will win 44/76 games in which their starters throw quality starts, seven games worse than they would if they won quality starts at the league average. In the worst AL East in recent memory, seven wins could make the difference for a Red Sox team that has struggled in the first third of the season.

What remains to be seen is if the bullpen or the batting lineup lets the starters down. The Red Sox bullpen has pitched 49 innings in games and the guys out of the pen have shone in those moments. The Red Sox bullpen has a 2.39 ERA and 1.04 WHIP in those games.[2] That compares favorably to the league averages out of the bullpen of 3.52 ERA and 1.27 WHIP. Koji Uehara has blown saves in a couple of these games, most recently on Sunday, but on the whole the bullpen pitchers have done very well protecting their starters’ quality starts.

The Red Sox were banking on being above average in their ability to carry their pitchers, but when their pitchers put them in a chance to win, they perform worse than the league average. In their 24 quality starts the Red Sox have averaged 3.75 runs per game. That’s close to the MLB average 4.14 runs per game, but not quite cracking the average is embarrassing for a lineup that was supposed to carry the team.

What’s more, the runs-per-game mark is buoyed by four outings of 8 runs or more (8, 8, 8, 9). If you exclude those four games, the Red Sox average only 2.75 runs per game, simply unacceptable for a team with playoff aspirations. In Red Sox quality starts, Red Sox batters have a weak 0.254/0.322/0.386 triple slash[3] and 0.249 batting average with RISP. Again this compares poorly with the MLB averages: 0.251/0.314/0.395 triple slash and 0.257 average with RISP.

Before the season ZiPS projected[4] the Red Sox batters would have a 0.265/0.333/0.407 triple slash. Until the Red Sox begin to bring their collective triple slash up to that level, particularly in games which their starters put together quality starts, they will continue to flounder at the bottom of the AL East. Paul Sporer and Eno Sarris pointed out the Red Sox failures at the plate in the May 28 episode of The Sleeper and the Bust. As the season goes on, analysts should follow their lead and consider the failures of the Red Sox batting order in addition to criticizing the low-hanging fruit that is the Red Sox starting rotation.

 

 

[1] All stats from ESPN unless otherwise noted. All stats are as of 6/1/15.

[2] As far as I could find there was no data complied on the Red Sox stats during quality starts so I compiled the statistics myself here.

[3] While this is bad, the Red Sox actually hit better in quality starts than on average – their triple slash for the season is 0.241/0.315/0.369. If I were arguing that the Red Sox are in last place because of their offense’s inability to perform in the same games that their pitchers do well, this stat would ruin my argument. However, since I am just using the stats in games when pitchers do well to highlight the fact that the pitchers get too much of the criticism, I feel that my argument is not undermined.

[4] I aggregated the zips projections of every players zips projected to get more than 25 at bats for this stat.