Daniel Bard is not a starting pitcher

Dude, seriously? Me? A starter? Did you SEE me in Single-A!? PHOTO CREDIT: Miami Herald

A lot of ideas have been bandied about this offseason as to how to fix the Red Sox ailing bullpen. One of the ideas that has gained significant traction is the idea of moving Daniel Bard to the starting rotation.

I can’t see how that’s anything but a bad idea.

In fact, I’m having a hard time figuring out what makes people think it’s a good idea. There’s almost nothing outside of pipe dream scenarios that would suggest Bard could be a starting pitcher at the Major League level.

Especially when you consider:

• That he lacks a starter’s repertoire– Bard has two outstanding pitches – his fastball and slider. He throws a change up that dives down and away from left handers, but it’s barely a below average pitch and not likely to help him at all as a starting pitcher. You’d have to think that if the Sox were to stretch him out, he’d have to take some oomph off his fastball as well – likely making it less effective – as Bard isn’t known for pinpoint control. So much for those sexy triple-digit heaters.

• He wasn’t a bad starter. He was awful – Check out this recap of Bard the starter in Single-A thanks to Brian MacPherson at the Providence Journal: 7.20 ERA with 3 K’s and 5 BB’s in the first inning. A 19.29 ERA with 4 K’s and 11 BB’s in the second inning. That was in Single-A Lancaster. After he was demoted to Greenville, he wasn’t much better. He racked up a 5.29  ERA in the 1^st inning, a 7.04 ERA in the second inning and 9.22 ERA in the third. He had a negative strike out to walk ratio. Yes, that’s right. Negative. If results were that bad in the minor leagues, I have a hard time seeing how results would be all that promising at the Major League level.

• His struggles as pitch counts get higher are worse than other relievers of his caliber- This isn’t that much of a worry for Bard as a reliever. He rarely gets to 20 pitches in a given outing. As a starter, becomes a huge red flag. Bard’s numbers fall off a cliff after 25 pitches. Proponents of the ‘start Bard’ crew would argue that it’s because he hasn’t been conditioned to go longer than that and I call BS – he was certainly in starter condition in Single-A. He didn’t perform. Besides, a lack of something is not proof of something else.

• He’s never pitched more than 80 innings in a single season – What’s even more worrisome is that over the past three years, we’ve seen substantial dips in his K/9 and increases in his BB/9 as he creeps closer to 80 innings. That’s not a good sign.

• He’s been a very good high-leverage reliever – He led the league in holds last year and has emerged as one of the most dominating relievers in the Majors. There’s no reason to remove him from that spot and create two potential holes provided he doesn’t pan out as a starter. Bard’s value is in the pen. If Boston were a team in desperate need to pursue dramatic pitching moves because they were out of options – it could be considered, but not on a team that already has three starters and $40 million sitting around to spend on other solutions (or other internal options like Alfredo Aceves).

• Remember the last time the Red Sox tried to convert an elite setup man to a starter’s role? Oh, hi Pap. How’s that lucrative closing contract in Philly treating you?

• ‘Because other teams have done it’ is the worst reason to do this – Fans have this nasty habit of falling for the ‘<fill in sexy organization of the week> did this stuff. We should do what they’re doing’ bit. Neftali Feliz, Justin Duchscherer and C.J. Wilson were all relievers who became starters and who all enjoyed success as starters. The big difference between those names and Bard is that those three were brought up through their respective systems as starters, not relievers. They were converted to relievers out of necessity, not the other way around. Bard is not the same kind of pitcher and lacks true professional experience as a starter.

With that in mind – the immediate question that follows is ‘well, if that’s true, then how come the Red Sox haven’t shot the rumor down?’ Good question, but I think there’s a logical answer to that, too.

Considering how out of control it appears the free agent market will get this offseason, the Red Sox would be smart not to kill the rumor and let it float out there that they’re not as in as desperate a need for starting pitching as it would appear. That in and of itself is a pretty good reason for keeping the lie alive as it could significantly improve their bargaining position.

Outside of that though, there’s not much of a reason to put Bard into the rotation. I’m sure it has been discussed at Fenway. I’m sure it may be discussed again sometime down the road. But there simply isn’t any evidence to suggest it would work other than a hope and a prayer – and that’s not a gamble the Red Sox should take in 2012 considering their needs and circumstances.

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Processing the Red Sox post-collapse week

After a completely absurd day in Red Sox Nation, I feel like I’m sitting here with far more questions than I have answers. This might be a little all over the place, but I’ll try my best.

The more I read these stories, the more things just don’t add up. The Red Sox collapsed. When pro sports teams collapse, GM’s and coaches get fired. It’s pretty standard fare, right?

More questions than answers remain about the Red Sox future

Sure, it sucks Francona got stuck holding the bag. I had hoped for a better fate for him, but it’s not an unreasonable decision given the fact that Francona said he couldn’t ‘reach the team’ anymore. Seeing as that’s the fundamental function of a Major League manager, it’d make sense he’d be let go.

Theo Epstein has been a fantastic General Manager for the lion’s share of his time here in Boston. Two World Series championships, a slew of playoff births and winning 90 games or more in all but one season under his regime equals one impressive track record.

But he missed badly this year. Carl Crawford, Bobby Jenks and Dan Wheeler were all poor signings. They join a veritable pantheon of poor free agent acquisitions for Epstein over the years that includes Julio Lugo, Edgar Renteria, John Lackey and Mike Cameron. While Theo’s record in free agency is about par for the course – which is far better than most GM’s records in free agency these days – par doesn’t cut it when the bar was set as high as it was this year.

Ultimately, this team failed not because of the talent they brought in, but from a lack of preparation and depth. For a team with a $160 million payroll, it’s concerning that they didn’t do more to shore up the back-end of their blown apart pitching staff.

There were mistakes made… mistakes Theo has to own. Fairly or unfairly, GM’s deal with that reality and that responsibility every year all over baseball- even if said expectations aren’t necessarily fair. That’s why Theo’s exit wasn’t much of a surprise, either.

In spite of two fairly logical events predictably transpiring the way many thought they would, it still stings. Epstein and Francona are the architects of a new era in Red Sox baseball – one known for cutting-edge thinking, shrewd decision-making, impeccable poise and most of all – winning.

That makes it easy and understandable that people are (desperately) looking for an explanation as to why things transpired in September the way they did. People frequently demand logical explanations to illogical events that can’t be easily explained.

Thus we woke up today to a Boston Globe story that absolutely ran the Red Sox Organization over like a snowplow. Its contents taught us a lot. At least I think they did. Chicken wings, beer and video games apparently created a sense of apathy amongst the pitching staff that explained their poor performance. Adrian Gonzalez is a space cadet, that’s why he couldn’t hit home runs anymore. Terry Francona pops pills, so he can’t manage. Owners buy stuff for players when they upset them. That makes the players spoiled. Because they’re spoiled, they’re entitled. Because they’re entitled, they’re lazy. Because they’re lazy, they lost. By the end of the piece, a whole swath of players were mentioned and summarily shredded to pieces.

Conspicuous by it’s absence however, was any real indictment of the ownership group, itself – minus the headphones incident. That led Keith Olberman, WEEI, Peter Gammons, Dan Shaughnessey, Michael Felger and others to immediately set Tom Werner, Larry Lucchino and John Henry in their sites and create a villain to rail against in the process.

It’s hard to blame them. After all, sports writers are story tellers by trade ya know. Stories need dragons and dragon slayers. Needless to say, the Red Sox ownership group make a great three-headed Monster X to the working man’s Godzilla. Among other things, the owners have an extensive track record of media manipulation, high-priced failures and oh yeah – they’re really fucking rich in a bad economy. Not helping things this week was their Baghdad Bob interview on their own TV network and Larry Lucchino acting like a petulant child in multiple press conferences. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.

But something about these stories and speculation doesn’t stick. Well scratch that. A lot doesn’t stick. Like I said earlier, there are more questions than answers, some of which would include:

• Why would ownership ride Tito Francona out on a rail when they knew full-well it would greatly jeopardize the Red Sox brand by attacking one of its most prominent figures? Why would they take shots in retaliation to comments Francona made last week when they already responded to them in public on WEEI this past Friday? Especially when it’d create – with the help of media dweebs, of course – an atmosphere that would pretty much guarantee that no player worth their salt would ever want to come and play here?

• If the ownership trio is this vindictive, then why doesn’t it carry over into their other businesses? They took control of Liverpool players like Torres and Meireles who left in the final minutes of two transfer windows (trade deadlines) at their own request under pretty selfish circumstances but there’s nothing in the British press about either of them. Ngog and Babel both moved on to better situations and nothing about them, either. They fired manager Roy Hodgson, amidst an early season collapse and he was let go with a friendly ‘thank you and good luck’. What is it about the Red Sox that causes Lucchino, Henry and Werner to let their fangs come out?

• And lastly, if the media crusade against Sox brass is being done to ‘hold them accountable’, then what does that mean, exactly? Furthermore, what are they supposed to do to prove said ‘accountability’? Refund everyone’s tickets? Let Adrian Gonzalez come over to our houses and make balloon animals? Yell a lot? Cry? Have sex with a yak?

What is the end result of all this posturing supposed to be? Long story short, kids – what’s the point of all this?

What conceivable role would ownership play in preventing the collapse anyway? Are they supposed to come in and spank John Lackey with a checkbook every time he rolls his eyes? Sit Ortiz when he can’t hit a beach ball? They can’t take everyone’s contract away. What were they supposed to do, exactly?

So without there really being much of a reason at all to blame them for the collapse and even less incentive on the part of the owners to hammer one of their most successful businesses into oblivion for no other reason than to prove a point, why are we even mentioning them in the ‘blame’ category with regards to the September collapse? How on earth do you make such a circle a square?

But halt the presses, there are more non-sensical things to blame – all of which range from silly to ambitiously stupid. Some of them could be considered downright mean. All of them have holes you could drive a truck through that paint a picture of a media beside itself and in the midst of – dare I say it – a collapse of their own:

• Re: Francona: Why would Francona’s ongoing issues at home and with pain killer meds hinder the team in September and April, but not in the middle of the season when they’re winning 71 out of 100 games? Why didn’t it affect him over the course of the last six years that said disputes have been going on? What changed this year?

• Re: Clubhouse discontent: Why are stories being run when Globe Editor Joe Sullivan candidly admitted today during a Globe Chat that in fact – none of the reporters who wrote today’s scathing account of the Red Sox clubhouse actually had access to the clubhouse or saw any of said antics physically taking place?

• Re: KFC: Why is fast food such an issue all of a sudden? Remember Derek Jeter eating Happy Meals before every game? Why’s it a big deal now?

• Re: loltolduso!~!: Why are people dragging the Jack McKeon story around about locking a clubhouse door as proof that Josh Beckett is an alcohol swilling maniac without actually checking the physical location of where the Marlins clubhouse actually is (That would be across the stadium – of which if Beckett needed a cold one, he’d have to call time, walk across the diamond in the middle of the game and then back across it to the dugout to accomplish said act)? Given the actual information, doesn’t that make that whole story seem absurd?

• Re: disgraceful performance that let us all down: How is winning 90 games – as Masslive.com columnist Ron Chimelis dubbed it – a ‘disgrace’? What does that make the other 25 teams in the majors who didn’t win 90+ games?

• Re: Chemistry: How on earth are there ‘chemistry issues’ when players are eating fried foods, drinking booze, and playing video games together in the clubhouse? Wouldn’t that suggest that the opposite is true? That maybe the problem is too much chemistry? Now mind you, had this team made a post-season run the story would likely be about how said cronyism in the locker room would be indicative of undying affection and team unity, but alas.

• Re: People sitting on benches and telepathy: How does the presence of Lester, Beckett and Lackey on the team bench translate into wins? Do they have some sort of mental tai chi that can only be channeled from the dugout bench that would make Darnell McDonald not be such an incredibly shitty baseball player? What value is to be had from them physically sitting on a bench?

• Re: how clubhouses ‘should’ behave: Since when was there a template for how teams are supposed to behave in a clubhouse? The 1918 Red Sox dealt with deep-seeded religious divides and an out of control Babe Ruth. They won a World Series. The Yankees teams of the late 70s played amidst a volatile front office and locker room. They won a few championships, themselves? Some have gone on to say this is the worst-behaved Sox team of all time, but I’m not even sure its the worst behaved Red Sox team of the last 20 years. Did we forget the Vaughn/Canseco/Everett team? Good teams don’t need to be tiptoeing through the tulips together to be good. It’s nice when they are, but it’s not a necessary condition for winning to occur.

• Re: Players upstaging their manager: Why was David Ortiz’s storming into Francona’s press conference treated as a big deal only weeks removed from a story that ran telling us that the reason it happened was because of a practical joke played on Ortiz by Dustin Pedroia? (There’s that clubhouse chemistry thing again)

• Re: The other chokers: Why aren’t they using Mountain Dew and Moon Pies to explain the Atlanta Braves’ implosion? So I guess that one was just a random statistical occurrence… but not the Red Sox?

• Re: WTF is this about: Why on earth is Michael Felger – who looks like Francis from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, picking a fight with Prom Queen Heidi Whatney? Ugly people don’t win those kinds of fights.

The only real thing I took away from today’s bloodbath was more about people’s need to construct narratives around randomness than anything else. Fact remains if this team had won one more game, not a single shred of this would have surfaced. I sure as heck wouldn’t be writing this. And heck – KFC would be selling ‘Becketts of Chicken”. Forget ‘Rally Monkeys” and “Rally Squirrels”. Enter “Rally chicken. Wing.”

All kidding aside, these issues all point to the real problem in all this.

The using of anonymous sources to kill everyone, with no accountability for the accusers is terrible. It’s bush-league journalism at its worst. If you’re going to run a story this scathing, you need to have people named, especially when the most piercing comments are about those who are on their way out the door.

If this was Red Sox management doing a hack job on another personality leaving town, then do your job and make them accountable for what they’re going to say and define what that is. If it’s not them, then don’t run the story. It’s a dangerous precedent to set when you’re implying that it’s OK for any random dude to say he saw bad stuff and use that as ammunition to mow down an entire team and organization.

At the end of the day, blaming “team chemistry” is cop-out speak for not wanting to talk about baseball. You know – the game that needs to be played and won on the field for a team to be deemed ‘successful’. Folks need to come to grips with the fact that the team the Red Sox put on the field in September was not a good baseball team.

Mike Aviles was up and down all year – for the Royals. Josh Reddick showed signs of promise in July, but predictably face-planted in August and turned into what he is, which is an OK bat off the bench and a defensive liability. Darnell McDonald is a bad baseball player. Jerrod Saltalamaccia works hard, but he’s a below-average hitter at best. The pitching rotation consisted of John Lackey, a 45 year old man and a AA pitcher. Carl Crawford was doing his Jeff Francour impression while Adrian Gonzalez turned into Billy Butler.

This team didn’t just look like the Royals, but they even went as far as to put a similar (if not lower) level of talent on the field.

Should the Sox have been this bad? No. Should conditioning have been better? Yes. A better sense of urgency? Sure. But how people  demonstrate that sense of urgency is relative and even worse – there’s no real way to measure what’s intense from one player to the next. To make the situation even more untenable, the more passionate you become as a player, or the more accountable you hold your teammates publicly, the more the Boston media comes after you.

Just ask Kevin Youkilis, who, after weeks of the media prattling on and on about holding teammates accountable last year, actually did so by questioning Jacoby Ellsbury’s injury and his toughness. What was loudly praised by talking heads all over the Hub last year as Youkilis showing leadership was transformed into him being a clubhouse cancer this year.

If the media is just going to change the questions every time a player gives them an answer, why would they expect them to be so candid in turning their nightly locker room chats into a version of the People’s Court? What do people expect the players to do?

Should Carl Crawford have given the same impassioned speech he gave to the players in September behind closed doors in front of a TV camera just so we can all be sure that he did it? Imagine Crawford going bananas on camera. Imagine the ‘Carl Crawford, clubhouse cancer’ stories in the Globe the next day. Or ‘Crawford shows up teammates’. I can hear songs of Felger proclaiming that Crawford’s over paid and underperformance doesn’t give him the credibility to say such things. I’m sure you all can fill out the rest.

Which brings me to my point. This isn’t about clubhouse chemistry. It’s not about players or owners or anyone holding anyone accountable. It’s not about laziness, conditioning, entitlement or anything close to it. It’s about the Red Sox failing to execute. Red Sox players and Red Sox players only are to ‘blame’ for the collapse.

But the meltdown it its aftermath? That’s on a Boston sports media that has become so entitled and self-important that they’re really THAT upset over this team costing them their meal ticket to go to a World Series, spew verbal diarrhea into a TV camera, reinforce their own self-importance and raise their own narcissistic public profile. If they don’t get to do that, then someone needs to pay. It doesn’t matter if it makes sense, doesn’t matter if it’s fair, heads just need to roll. In their minds, people need to hear them as the moral authority figures they think they are. If a few innocent folks get chopped to bits in the process, so be it.

The media wants to point at people for a sense of entitlement, laziness and contempt for others? Look in the mirror, assholes. It goes both ways.

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