Red Sox Pitching Overstock: Enter Smoltz, Exit...Who?

(Photo by Jim Rogash/Getty Images)

  I will not hold you in unnecessary suspense.

 The resolution of the Boston Red Sox starting pitcher logjam that has everyone speculating will be...nothing. Well, nothing much: yes, Brad Penny will be traded, but only for more spare pieces, probably some minor leaguers. Although the team has a few obvious problems---short, the travails of DH David Ortiz, the ineffectiveness of Dice-K Matsusaka---none of those can be solved with a trade of pitching depth, at least now. Later on...well, that’s a different story.

 It could easily have worked out very differently. When the Red Sox began stockpiled starting pitching over the winter, the odds were that Theo Epstein’s mantra, “These things tend to work themselves out” would hold true. The team had at least eight pitchers who were fully rotation-worthy (Beckett, Lester, Matsuzaka, Wakefield, Penny, Masterson, Buchholtz and Smoltz, with a ninth, Michael Bowden, also an option), but there were plenty of chances for attrition. Wakefield was over 40, with a tear in his shoulder that had sidelined him in each of the last two seasons. Penny and Smoltz had both broken down last year, and might not return to form. Lester’s heavy pitching load in 2008 was a cause for wariness. Buchholtz might not be able to recover the poise and execution that had conspicuously deserted him as a member of the Sox rotation last season. Epstein learned his lesson from the disastrous trade of Bronson Arroyo before the 2006 campaign, when he thought he had a safely over-stuffed starting stable of Curt Schilling, David Wells, Jonathan Papelbon, Matt Clement, Beckett and Wakefield, with Lester in the wings.  But  Clement, Schilling and Wells went down with injuries and the unsteadiness of Keith Foulke made Papelbon the closer, and the Sox ended up with the likes of Abe Alvarez, Julian Taveras, Lenny DiNardo, and Jason Johnson as fourth and fifth starters. (It didn't help that the return on Arroyo, Wily Mo Pena, couldn't hit a curve with a tennis racket or catch a fly ball with a basket.)

 Theo reasonably assumed a starting pitcher would go down in 2009, but it hasn’t happened. Meanwhile, almost every other team has a pitching deficit, which would seem to indicate that the Sox could make a killing in a seller’s market. Though that still may come to pass, the timing is wrong for a substantial trade for a number of reasons:

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