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

(Photo by Jim Rogash/Getty Images)

 1. Sending Matsuzaka to the minors, the DL or the bullpen. Never. Dice-K has not had enough healthy starts to lose his job. His last one wasn’t even a fair test, being interrupted by a long rain delay. Dice-K is a career ace, he is relatively young, and he won 33 games in his first two seasons with the Sox. This is by far the solution that Red Sox fans prefer because they have never warmed up to Dice-K, but the fact that his pitching style irritates the stat-obsessed is irrelevant. He’s not going anywhere, except out to pitch every fifth day.

 2. Going to a six-man rotation. To paraphrase Bill James, this means taking four starts from the team’s best starting pitcher, four starts from the team’s second-best starting pitcher, four starts from the team’s third-best starting pitcher, four starts from the team’s fourth-best starting pitcher, and four starts from the team’s fifth-best starting pitcher, and giving them to the sixth best. It is, in short, a stupid and lazy thing to do. And Theo is neither stupid nor lazy.

 3. Sending Tim Wakefield to the bullpen. Sure, send the starter with the best record to the bullpen, especially when your starting catcher can’t catch him if he’s brought in to relieve. This theory is a favorite of the anti-Wake knuckleball bigots, and it is pure fantasy.

 4. Sending Brad Penny to the bullpen. Brad Penny is only on the team to show future employers that he can be a premier starting pitcher again. He would be a team disruption if sent to the bullpen, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he was promised last winter that he would not be. The team would trade him or release him first. Bet on trade.

 5. Sending Dan Bard to Pawtucket to allow Wakefield, Dice-K or Penny to go to the bullpen. This makes no sense, because it weakens the team. Bard has shown that he can overpower Major League hitters. He had a bad outing, due to control, last time out, but if any team has sent a pitcher who had held batters to a .070 batting average to the minors after one bad inning, I’d be surprised. The Red Sox bullpen is perfect right now. Theo will not risk defacing his masterpiece and the strength of the team.

 Thus the verdict: John Smoltz will take Brad Penny’s place in the rotation, as Penny is bundled off to the Mets, the Cards, the Braves, the Rockies, or some other hopeful contender, in exchange for some minor league talent. Buchholtz, Bowden and even Kason Gabbard will still be lurking on the depth chart, and that big trade could still be coming.

 But not yet.

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