5-21-2011: Sox acquire Morales, sign Millwood

Sox trade a PTBNL for Franklin Morales

The pitching injuries are piling up again. With Dan Wheeler and Bobby Jenks out, the bullpen is a little thin. I was a little surprised to hear that Hideki Okajima was DFA’d, but you have to know that the Sox were dissatisfied with their lefty reliever situation this year, quickly discarding Denys Reyes. This move comes down to upgrading the bullpen. Morales was considered a pretty good prospect just two years ago, and is a lefty who throws a 94 mph heater and a good curve. His presence makes the deteriorating Okajima expendable (his three-year numbers are all trending in the wrong direction). Theo Epstein is hoping that we can retain him if he can slip through waivers, but if not, we’ll trade him.

It’s true, Morales’ numbers are not good, but that’s why he was available. He strikes out more hitters than Oki, but has struggled with walking batters and giving up the long ball (though I hear that happens from time to time in Colorado). Perhaps Curt Young can work some magic with the young flamethrower. I’ll have to see what we send back in return for him, but this seems like a good upside deal to me.

Kevin Millwood signed to a minor-league deal

5-17-2011: What we know about our pitchers by now

While several hitting statistics are starting to stabilize by this point in the season, pitching stats take quite a bit longer to mean something. At 150 batters faced, you can reference strikeout rate, GB rate and line drive rate, and at 200 batters faced, you can talk about fly ball rate and FB/GB ratio. Here’s a look at these numbers from our rotation:

	2011						2010
Name	BF	K%	GB%	LD%	FB%	GB/FB	BF	K%	GB%	LD%	FB%	GB/FB
Lester	238	24.4%	55.3%	12.0%	32.7%	1.69	861	26.1%	53.6%	16.9%	29.6%	1.81
Buchholz	202	14.9%	47.0%	14.6%	38.4%	1.22	711	16.9%	50.8%	17.7%	31.5%	1.61
Beckett	195	25.1%	43.8%	16.4%	39.8%	1.10	577	20.1%	45.8%	19.0%	35.3%	1.30
Lackey	192	9.9%	33.6%	21.2%	45.2%	0.74	930	16.8%	45.6%	18.4%	36.0%	1.27
Matsuzaka	167	15.6%	31.6%	12.8%	55.6%	0.57	664	20.0%	33.0%	21.6%	45.5%	0.73
Wakefield	99	11.1%	37.5%	16.3%	46.3%	0.81	610	13.8%	37.0%	16.5%	46.6%	0.79

You can see that Jon Lester is his same dominant self, and that he is clearly the ace of this staff, boasting very high strikeout and ground ball rates. Josh Beckett is fully healthy, striking out hitters at the highest rate in the rotation and a lower line drive rate. Clay Buchholz is very solid in these peripherals, and so we should continue to see solid starts out of him, though he won’t likely reproduce that sub-3.00 ERA from last season.