Defending Theo

With the Red Sox losing 5 and half games to the Yanks since the All-Star break, The boy genius has been taking alot of heat for taking no significant action at the trade deadline. the Red Sox of course have been known for "winning" the deadline, though never the division, in recent years, and the chowderheads are understandably miffed that the one small victory they have come to count on has been taken away from them. And don't look for Javy Lopez to brighten any days in Boston. The best catchers are toast at 35 and Lopez was never among the best, or even the good, catchers in baseball defensively and he hasn't been an offensive threat for two years. It is at just these times that Master Epstein could typically rely upon Peter Gammons to bring an inexplicably acquired Hall of Fame cred to bear on behalf of his fledging yet high flying reputation. With Gammons silenced, I thought I might give it a whirl just for kicks.

Boy Epstein rather infamously said that he could have made deals, but that it would have been "short-sighted" to diverge from their "plan" and part with any of the pitching prospects that he had raised from pups. Fans and foes alike wondered if they were really listening to the GM of the Sox or the Gm of the Royals or Pirates. The latter franchises of course are all about long term plans and cultivated prospects, while Boston, being locked in mortal rivalry with the greatest franchise in the history of organized sport, must look to win today and tomorrow and every day thereafter. How then could baseball's own Jimmy Neutron refuse to do what it takes to ensure victory this year when he is, as conventional wisdom has it, simply awash in valuable young arms?

The answer I would propose is that he really isn't suffering all that great an embarrassment of pitching riches and the trade market apprised him of that fact. Obviously Papelbon is no longer a prospect; he's a legitimate star and there is no reason in the world the Sox would part with him at this point, any more than the Yanks would part with Wang. But that leaves the Sox with Lester, and Lester alone, who occupies the same place in their projections (and other teams' calculations) as Phillip Hughes does for the Yanks. He, like Hughes, is the person everyone the Sox approached wanted to talk about, and inasmuch as he is, for the moment, the future of starting pitching in Boston, the whole future perhaps, he is also the one person Theo doesn't want to discuss. It is like Cashman and Hughes only in some sense worse. All the injuries and disappointments the Sox have suffered on their staff (Wells, Clement, Wakefield, Foulke, Di Nardo,Taveras, Seanez, Johnson, and lately Timlin) has meant that Lester needs to be much of their present as well as their future. But those same injuries and disappointments have caused a still deeper problem. They have forced the Red Sox to move Hansen and Delcarmen from the minors, where they figured as crucial examples of the youthful abundance of future pitching the Sox possessed, to the majors, where they figured as instances of the present underachievement that haunts the Sox staff. Neither Hansen and DelCarmen have done particularly well in their maiden season, and so have not attested to the promise they seemed to hold just last year. Their value on the trade market plummeted accordingly. The boy-genius did not take either of these "gems" off the table in deference to some long range scheme (that scenario was only true of Lester); he refused to part with them in light of how little they would presently bring in return, and on the hope that their past promise might be resuscitated by future performance. And really what else could he do? People who complain that Epstein failed to cash in the chips that would improve the Red Sox dramatically this season are clinging to the hype that the ERA of messrs Hansen and DelCarmen has largely dispelled. Epstein would have loved to sustain that hype long enough to realize positive gain on one or both, but being a well-known sabrematician, he was not really in a position to pull off that bit of salesmanship. Epstein was a victim of contingencies that made the stats less meaningful than they might otherwise be. But when your signature lie is that the numbers don't lie, it's hard to convince people they do.

I'm off to Cingular tomorrow to catch the Yanks live against the White Sox. I'll report the following day.