Daisuke Matsuzaka: Shiny on the Outside, Not so Much on the Inside

Two years after the Japanese phenom known as Daisuke Matsuzaka became a Red Sox, he’s certainly been worth the money if all you care about are wins. Only Brandon Webb, Roy Halladay and CC Sabathia have won more games over the last two seasons.

If you told me two years ago that he would be 18-2 with a 2.80 ERA on Sept. 21, my eyes would have bugged out. Wow! Worth the money!

Then my eyes would have bugged in once I let myself know he has thrown a paltry 163.2 innings, and only one other person out of the field of eight that have at least 17 wins has not gone over 200 innings (Mike Mussina—189.1 innings).

I would have swallowed hard at his 92 walks, which you have to go 15 pitchers down the win leaderboard to Edison Volquez (16-6, 3.29, 188.2) to get another number as high as that (also 92 walks). And the pitcher after that to have cracked at least 78 walks is Ubaldo Jiminez, tied for 51st in the majors in wins at 11-12, with a 4.12 ERA through 185.2 innings.

Ahh...he’s got the wins. He’s got the ERA. But when are the innings and the spotless basepaths going to come?

With a minimum of 80 innings pitched, Dice-K is 124th out of 162 pitchers in K/BB, at 1.62. (Fausto Carmona is dead last at 0.82—52 strikeouts, 69 walks—holy cow!)

There is cause for hope, though. Before the All-Star break, Dice-K’s K/BB ratio was 1.35. Since then, he’s at an even 2.00, which would rocket him up to 87th place, tied with such esteemed pitchers as Jamie Moyer, Aaron Cook, Jose Contreras and Jair Jurrjens. Eh, I suppose we’d take that.

Last year, he was able to contribute 204.1 innings. This year, he won’t even be able to crack 175. (He started 32 games last year, he will start 29 or 30 this year.) That’s a step backward. Another step backward occurs when you look at last year’s K/BB ratio: 2.51.

He’s gone way backward. The wins have gone up, the losses and ERA down. But that doesn’t tell the whole story: Dice-K is simply not a valuable pitcher. He has turned into a five-inning pitcher who is one well-timed pitch away from a meltdown in any start.

To give him credit, he has quite the stuff. His pitches dip, dive, and dart all over the place. He was just filthy against the Blue Jays; I was able to catch some of the game and the movement he was spinning off was unreal.

There could be many reasons for the decline of some of his stats. Perhaps the workload last year has affected him this year. Last year in the regular season, he tossed 3,482 pitches. This year, it’s at 2,725, but that number is misleading if considered in a vacuum—he’s throwing fewer pitches because he’s not lasting long into games. Perhaps this is his “sophomore slump.”

Whatever it is, Dice’s numbers aren’t as valuable as they look. That’s a concern heading into the postseason, because we’ll have to save our arms for when Dice-K’s turn comes around in the rotation. It could mean the difference between a 10-man or 11-man pitching roster.