illinoisredsox

If Vazquez goes out do you hit for Price? I say no.

True but moreso for an AL guy. An NL guy figures to get a few ABs a week pinch hitting for pitchers or as a result of double switches.

Got to feel for Rutledge. 1 AB since May 29 (against a guy throwing 98) and then a start against one of the best in the game. The life of an AL bench player.

Home runs don't bother me. It's what damage is done with those home runs that matters. Porcello has allowed 148 home runs in his career. 86 have been solo, 44 have been with 1 on, 17 with 2 on and 1 grand slam. That ratio really hasn't changed with Boston. For Boston, he's allowed 37 total, 22 solo, 13 2 run and 2 3 run. Solo homers don't mean much and 2 run homers normally don't kill you. Of course, you can't give up 3 or 4 of them in a game. Put another way, a solo homer is 4 total bases and 1 run. 4 singles is also 4 total bases, but would normally score 2 runs and there's still 2 men on base.

One could also say he was unlucky in the fourth. Two very soft hit singles followed by the sharp grounder through the hole set the whole inning up. The walk to force the run in was not good, but better that than giving up a big fly ala Buchholz, and he minimized the damage with the DP ball. I'm not sure what people are expecting. He's not a Cy Young candidate. He's a #3-4 starter. He's durable, he'll give you 6 or so innings most times out. He's going to give up 3-4 runs most games. Those types of pitchers are going to look great when everything is in sync, but they don't keep it in sync for more than a few games at a time. Realistically, if before last night you were told Porcello would give you 6 innings and 3 runs, how many would have taken it? Be honest. I know I would have.

All I'll say is the guy behind the plate last night was excellent. Nice and consistent the entire game, which is all the players ask for. Sure, he appeared to miss a few pitches, but the "misses" were always borderline on the black type pitches. No down the middle balls or strikes on pitches 4 inches out of the zone.

Those slumps always seemed to coincide with visits to Kansas City. The Sox just could not seem to hit there in those days.

Nah, at least when Kelly gets hurt it's baseball related. Pulling a groin running happens. An arm injury while actually throwing a pitch happens. And he comes back in "normal" time frames. Buchholz missing half a season because he slept wrong holding his daughter not so much. (Now to be fair, I have always believed that Buchholz hurt his shoulder a couple of weeks before the sleeping incident in a game against Toronto when he awkwardly fielded a chopper near the first base line and fell on his right shoulder. The sleeping thing may have further aggravated it, but I think the fall was the actual cause. His velocity has not been the same since.)

No max, you are right on Shaw. Hard stuff away, and especially up, is giving him fits right now and for the past few weeks. He needs stay on those pitches and even think left field on them. He may need a day or 2 off to clear his head (frankly, tonight would not be the worst time for that with a very tough lefty going for the Giants). He has been in every game so far, and I think maybe started all but 1.

Sometimes pitches down the middle get popped up, sometimes good pitches get hammered. Betts nails a ball up the middle that was caught by the pitcher. Bogie bloops one into no mans land that score 2 runs to win the game. It's baseball.

He made the play of the night last night when he slid under that tag avoiding the double play on Big Papi's chopper that tied up the game. Great base running.

The homer wasn't even a bad pitch. Down and away; yeah it could have been a little more down and away, but it was the kind of pitch that a left handed hitter will often roll over and hit a grounder to second with.

Rather than eliminating data points, just cap the number of runs that you use at some number (11, 13, 15, whatever). Above a certain level, it really doesn't matter. You could probably adapt something like what the USGA does with equitable stroke control (ESC). ESC basically means that for the purposes of determining handicaps, your score on a given hole is capped at a certain level. You still write down what you made on the scorecard, but when you report it afterwards, it gets adjusted. Right now, my max score n most courses is an 8. So If I shoot 90 but on one hole I had a 9, the handicap formula uses ESC and records it as an 89. Obviously in baseball, you wouldn't weight the adjustment, but you could still cap it.

Right now, nothing, because there's not much you can do. Obviously Castillo isn't even a consideration; he's not even hitting well in Pawtucket (Last I looked he was hitting under .250 and slugging around .320). Once Holt gets back, you go back to the platoon. Until then ... I found it very telling on how far Castillo has fallen in the pecking order when they used Rutledge to ph last night instead of Rusney. He is definitely deep in the doghouse.

Like I said, I'm no statistician. I don't even know what sample normalization means (and don't care to). I was going to put in something like your second sentence, but couldn't figure out a way to say it clearly; you phrased the upper and lower boundary issues perfectly.

So what is considered an outlier? Consider the following. Last year's staff allowed 753 runs, which equates to an average of 4.65 runs per game; the standard deviation for this data was 3.43. So a shutout would be within about 1.33 standard deviations. The 5 high games were 18, 14, 14, 13 and 13. or between 2.5 and nearly 4 standard deviations. Going back to the 2013 Sox. That team allowed 4.04 runs per game with a standard deviation of 2.84. A shutout was about 1.4 standard deviations. The 5 high games were 15, 13, 12, 12 and 11, again between about 2.5 and 4 standard deviations. I'm no statistician (the above is about as far as I care to go in that realm), but it seems to me that the true outliers in this case are are the upper end, where the distance from the average is 3 deviations or more. Under 1.5 just doesn't seem that far out to me. (Note, the above uses runs per game because that data was easy to enter into a spreadsheet; I was not going to examine the box scores of each game to determine earned runs, and I doubt it would have changed the overall picture anyway) I now leave it to you and moonslav to discuss.

Have to say this plate umpire has been excellent. A few misses here and there but nothing ridiculous.

It showed. That was a very rusty swing.

Weird inning, the ground ball single was the hardest hit ball.

Amazing stat: the last 5 hits allowed by the Red Sox pitching staff have left the yard.

It wasn't a bad pitch, down and away. Probably could have been a inch further away. The hitter got him is all.

It's not so much that Hanley gets thrown out by 5 feet, it's that he's done it several times and on guys he had no business trying it on. He may have gotten away with it when he was younger and a step faster, but that step is your 5 feet.

It becomes a matter of being able to read plays and knowing the outfielders. Napoli was good at it. Mike Lowell was good at it. Ortiz, when he could still run a little, was good at it. Nava never was. Slow guys who knew how to run the bases. Nava, not a speedster, was terrible. Back in the day, teams didn't run on Dwight Evans. Right now, it makes zero sense to run on Bautista. OTOH, you take every chance you can to run when an Ellsbury or a Damon is out there. Will they occasionally get you? Sure, but it doesn't make it a bad play when they do.

I don't think Swihart was judged by the brass based on the April 10th game. I think the bigger issue was his inability to consistently block balls in the dirt, a lack of confidence by some of the pitchers in him to do that when they bounced a splitter or a curve, and that it had not improved from last season when he allowed 46 wild pitches (plus 16 passed balls, no idea how many PB were Wright related).

Price seems to be coming around. His last 5 starts he's pitched 34 1/3, given up 13 runs (12 earned) for an ERA of 3.14 and a WHIP of 1.08. Sox have gone 4-1 in those games (he has not been the pitcher of record in all of them). His ERA has dropped almost 2 points over those 5 starts. I'd say he's gotten back to being somebody you can rely on. He's have a tough match-up Wednesday against Baumgardner.