The Rotation Has Been Bad But Is The Rotation Bad?

Assessing the damage after a tough weekend

waaaaaaaaay too much of this over the weekend

Last season was brutal. It seemed like every game saw the Red Sox down by five runs in the first two innings. That’s not exactly true, but it was true far more often than you’d like. The 2020 Red Sox rotation was the worst Red Sox rotation in the history of the franchise relative to the league. That’s going back over 120 seasons. That’s bad. It was bad.

The last week has been worse.

The 2020 Red Sox starters posted a 5.34 ERA. The past seven games have seen Sox starters put up a 7.71 ERA. Now I’m comparing a full season (or whatever the heck 2020 was) to seven games, so not totally fair. I get that. But I do think it shows how awful, how horrendous, how hideously terrible the Red Sox starting staff has been during this run.

That trend continued yesterday with… I’m three paragraphs in and I’ve already run out of synonyms for bad… I’ll resort to capitals… a BAD start from Martin Perez. Perez gave up five runs in the first inning including three home runs. Before the Red Sox came to bat they were down five runs. It was like 2020 all over again. Of all the years to relive, that one is pretty close to the bottom of the list.

So the Red Sox lost 18-4, and a big part of that is on Perez and on every other starter who has failed to pull their weight and forced the bullpen to throw a ton of innings over the past week plus of games. But don’t let the final score fool you. The Blue Jays scored 13 runs off of Ryan Weber, who I think it’s pretty clear by now is simply not a major league pitcher, Marwin Gonzalez, and Christian Arroyo. I’m going to go out on a limb and say Gonzalez and Arroyo aren’t major league pitchers either. This isn’t to take anything away from Toronto. They’ve bludgeoned Red Sox pitching over this whole series, but it’s not like they did this against Nate Eovaldi, Adam Ottavino, and Matt Barnes. Though they may, as Eovaldi is starting today.

The Red Sox were in first place for a long time this season. They would be the home team in the AL Wild Card game if the season ended today. All of that is because the starting rotation was decent. The offense has been very good, a bit inconsistent, but on the whole very good. The bullpen is good. Not great, but good. The defense is bad. That’s the team. Those last three things were relatively known before the season, with some variance maybe, but mostly they’re pretty constant. The reason so many analysts missed on this team was the starting rotation. They thought it would be bad, like last season. It hasn’t been. Until this stretch, that is.

In fact, before this last stretch, the rotation was actively good! Not great, but above average. That was more than enough to offset the defense and allow the offense to lift the team up. If this rotation can be somewhere around where they were then this is a playoff team, no question. If not and the rotation is a bomb crater, then we may as well sell at the deadline and start studying up on the top of the 2022 draft.

So the question is, are they really this bad?

No. They’re not.

But they might not be as good as we saw earlier either. There are two aspects of their recent performance that are worth discussing. The first is the sticky stuff, the spider tack, that allows pitchers to get much better grip on their pitches and generates much greater spin on the ball. MLB is cracking down on its use and that crackdown has coincided with this tremendous downturn in performance. This is an easy answer because the timeline works out and it seems like every Red Sox starter is going through the same rough patch.

Despite that though, it’s not correct. Chad Jennings, my old colleague at The Athletic, has looked into this in depth. The whole article is worth reading and while I recommend it, it’s behind their paywall so I’m not going to excerpt it here except to say smart people have looked at the numbers and they show Red Sox starters aren’t getting hit harder because of a change in their spin rate.

That’s not to say some or all of them weren’t using spider tack or some other sticky substance, just that there hasn’t been a big change in any of their spin rates that coincides with their downturn in performance.

So if not that, what might be the problem? Here’s a theory. We’ve just passed game number 66 of the season, more than were played last year. I’m sure I’m not breaking new ground by suggesting that perhaps Red Sox starters are hitting a bit of a wall. Every Red Sox starter save Eduardo Rodriguez has started 13 games during this season. Last season no Red Sox starter and no starter currently in the Red Sox rotation started that many games. Some were close. Martin Perez started 12 games in 2020. Nick Pivetta started two. Eovaldi started nine. Garrett Richards started 10. Eduardo Rodriguez didn’t pitch at all.

That’s a pretty significant leap for all these guys. Put that in your back pocket and look at this tweet from @RedSoxStats.

Red Sox Stats @redsoxstats

The common thread this weekend against the Jays is terrible pitch execution, missing spots over the plate and getting punished harshly for it.

Those are four instances where the Red Sox starter missed his spot and the Blue Jays hitter made him pay for it. It doesn’t prove anything statistically, but anecdotally I certainly noticed this as well. Go back to Saturday. Vlad Guerrero Jr’s homer off Nick Pivetta was a missed spot. Pivetta tried to throw low and away but left the pitch right here.

Here’s the homer Pivetta gave up to Biggio in the fifth. It came on a curveball that was supposed to be low, either at the bottom of the zone or below. Instead, the pitch was up and out over the plate.

The next Blue Jays homer was by Marcus Semien. It came on a slider that was supposed to be low and away. Instead it was over the middle of the plate at the belt.

I’m not going to go through every homer and hard-hit ball over the past seven days - honestly there have been too many - but this does stack pretty neatly with the above tweet.

It should be noted that major league pitchers miss their spots all the time, so that doesn’t necessarily absolve the Red Sox of anything. Further, it should be noted that when major league pitchers miss their spot, opposing hitters don’t always hit it over the wall, so credit Blue Jays hitters for that. When they’ve received bad pitches from Red Sox pitching they haven’t missed them.

But these kinds of missed location pitches would be consistent with fatigue. It’s hard to pitch in the major leagues, and that much more difficult to hit the small windows necessary for success when you’re tired. Again, this doesn’t remove any blame from Red Sox pitchers. They’re throwing the pitches. They need to do a better job. Period. But just by way of explanation, this could be some part of it. How much I’ll leave to you to decide.

Will they do a better job? Obviously neither you nor I can predict the future, but for this kind of thing I try to fall back on track record. That’s a bit more difficult here for various reasons specific to each pitcher, but on the whole I think the rotation performed admirably over the first two months of the season. That doesn’t mean nothing and I wouldn’t recommend throwing out two months in favor of a bad week and a half.

Let’s talk about the specific members of the rotation for a moment. Is this kind of performance something we should have expected from them?

Martin Perez was pitching over his head, that’s probably fair to say, before this rough patch. His home run rate is way below his career rate, so it’s possible he’s being helped inordinately by the new baseball, but his expected stats show him to be the same mediocrity we saw last season. That’s fine for a fifth starter, but that’s his ceiling and, unless he develops a new knuckleball between now and July, he should be the one to go to the bullpen if and when Chris Sale returns.

Garrett Richards was bad in his first two starts, and his walk rate is way higher than I’d like, but on the whole he’s been okay. Since his third start he has a 3.41 ERA, for whatever that’s worth. The strikeouts haven’t come around like I’d hoped, but he’s done a good job of keeping the ball on the ground, which has helped minimize damage. There might still be some upside there, but with each start I get closer to thinking he’s probably closer to Martin Perez than I’d like.

Nick Pivetta was getting a bit lucky early in the season but his performance since then has been consistent with a league average pitcher or maybe a bit better. The strikeouts are very good, the walks are acceptable, and the homers, while trending badly, are on the whole fine. He’s not an ace, but I feel comfortable saying he’s a reasonable number three pitcher, maybe a four on a better pitching staff than this one.

Eduardo Rodriguez is an interesting case. His expected numbers (xERA, FIP, xFIP) are all in the mid-3.00 range, while his ERA is over 6.00. His strikeouts are up and his walks are down and, consistent with that, I think he’s pitched much better than his results indicate. It’s hard to know what to make of him going forward because of the case of COVID and subsequent myocarditis that caused him to miss last season entirely. But if he’s healthy I don’t have a problem with him as a two or three in a playoff rotation.

Nate Eovaldi is in that Rodriguez group where the expected metrics think he’s been much better than his ERA. The strikeouts are down a bit and the walks up a bit, but on the whole I think he’s a fine pitcher. He’s probably a two on a weaker staff or a three on a good staff.

The combination is a bit more like the 2004 Cardinals than how I’d draw up my ideal starting staff, but a bunch of twos, threes, and fours can be extremely effective if paired with a high scoring offense.

So what do we make of these last two series of games against the Blue Jays and Astros? Have they exposed Boston’s rotation for the fraud that it is? Maybe, but I don’t think so. We have two months of data that says the rotation is good, or at least league average. We have a little over a week’s worth of data that says this Red Sox rotation is the worst rotation in human history.

Were I to guess, I think this is a confluence of factors. I think some fatigue is setting in, perhaps mildly worse than for some other teams due to the specifics of this rotation, i.e. how many games they started and how many innings they pitched last season.

I think that fatigue has coincided with facing two of the best offenses in baseball, both of whom are playing at the tops of their games (though the Jays admittedly are missing George Springer, so maybe the top of their game goes a bit higher, perish the thought). It’s always difficult to parcel out blame. If a Red Sox starter throws a hanging curve over the plate but the batter fouls it off and then strikes out on the next pitch, we forget about the hanger. It happened, but the batter wasn’t good enough in that moment to hit it, so the credit goes to the pitcher, even though he threw a pitch that easily could’ve been crushed. That happens all the time. How do you assess blame for the results of that at-bat? It’s complicated. But sometimes you throw the hanger and Vlad Jr hits it over the Mass Pike and then it’s not so complicated. Then you just messed up and that’s all there is to it.

I think we’re also seeing some… regression isn’t quite the right word, but there’s some coming-back-to-Earth factor here for some members of the rotation.

All of the above is really just my best guess. I’m sorry I can’t do better, be more specific, show you a bunch of gory maths. One thing I do know is that if there’s a chance to catch the Rays or to hold on to a playoff spot, they have to figure out a way to do better. These things can slip away quickly. It’s on the starting staff, manager Alex Cora, and pitching coach Dave Bush, to make sure that doesn’t happen.

For the record, I think they’re going to be okay. But this is the last paragraph, so if not, I can easily delete it later.