Red Sox Diaries

Boston kicks off a nine-game homestand tonight, opening with a four-game set against Baltimore. Slated to start for the Sox is Brad Penny, who made his Boston debut last weekend against the Angels. He turned in a fine, if unremarkable, performance: six innings, three runs and only two strikeouts. It got the job done, as he picked up the win, and it was certainly better than he pitched last season (6-9, 6.27 ERA), but nothing to get overly excited about. They must have been trying to start out slowly with him, because he only threw 86 pitches--an average of just more than 14 per inning. To give you some perspective, I checked how many times Daisuke Matsuzaka was that efficient last year in his 32 starts (including the playoffs). The answer? Twice.

Anyway, Penny's outing against the Angels was also his first pitching for an American League team. Now, it's no secret that the AL is a more difficult league for pitchers, both because of the designated hitter and because it just has more good hitters. There were just three National League teams last season that finished with a winning record in Interleague play (each NL team played 15 such games). Sure that's a small sample size, but it's been happening for so many years now that it's safe to say the AL is the better league.

So, what can the Red Sox count on getting out of Brad Penny in his first year against tougher competition? If Penny has fully recovered from all of his injury woes from a year ago, they should have a pitcher in his prime (he turns 31 in late May) who has shown the potential to be a solid two or three starter. Scouts have spoken highly of his stuff--a mid-90s fastball with a low-90s sinker and pretty sharp curveball. He's never really shown a tendency to give up the long ball (0.9 home runs per nine innings), so that should serve him well in hitter-friendly Fenway Park.

But the issue remains that we can only base our judgments off of his NL body of work, which might not be the greatest indicator. So I went back and compiled a list of pitchers this decade who started 100 or more games in the NL before switching over to the AL for the first time, trying to see how those pitchers performed after the move.

My initial group had 15 pitchers that fit the criteria. Originally I was going to crunch the numbers with all of them, but that would have given me data that was rather misleading. I mean, is it fair to compare Penny to the likes of Livan Hernandez, Vicente Padilla, Kris Benson, Steve Traschel and Odalis Perez? Probably not, because Penny is regarded now as a better pitcher than anyone in that quintet was when they changed leagues, and he's at a different point in his career. I eliminated Josh Beckett from consideration, too, because he was a few years younger and was a superior pitcher at the time of his jump than Penny is now. I omitted Javier Vazquez for similar reasons. Jon Lieber was scratched as well, because he was slightly older and had missed the entire year before he switched due to arm surgery. Besides, he's a different type of pitcher.

Then I got rid of Kevin Millwood and Chan Ho Park, too, because of the Arlington Stadium factor of playing for the Texas Rangers. I know you can eliminate this to some extent by using certain statistics, but still. Millwood will prove to be a good comparison in one way, but we'll get to that later. And lastly, I axed Hideo Nomo--he got a late start, had a quirky delivery, and he's probably a dated example by now. Even though the talent discrepancy between the two leagues is as vast now as it was then, the hitters Penny will be facing are not the ones Nomo did.

So now we're down to four comparable pitchers: Matt Clement, Carl Pavano, A.J. Burnett and Wade Miller. (Here are Penny's stats.) All of these guys were between 28 and 31 when they changed leagues and their experience and level of success in the NL were roughly similar to Penny's. Let's take a look at how they performed in the two leagues.

Just to give you a little background here, the stat I'm going to use as my main basis of comparison is not ERA, but rather adjusted ERA (referred to in shorthand as ERA+). For those unfamiliar with it, basically the idea is that looking at the raw ERA number does not usually tell the whole story--pitchers in the NL are going to have lower ERAs than their AL counterparts will because there are fewer runs scored in the NL. ERA+ tells you how much better a pitcher is than the league average (represented by the number 100). So, a pitcher with a 110 ERA+ is 10 percent better than how the average pitcher in his respective league would do under similar circumstances, and likewise a pitcher with a 90 ERA+ is 10 percent worse. The statistic also adjusts for ballpark factors, meaning it tries to take into account and standardize the statistics of a pitcher who throws half of his games at Coors Field and one who calls Petco Park home--the statistic realizes an ERA of 4.00 at Coors is more impressive than a 4.00 ERA at Petco. Because the league average is reconfigured on a year-by-year basis, you can use ERA+ to help compare pitchers across different eras. It evaluates pitchers in the context of the conditions under which they have to perform.

Getting back to the findings, the four pitchers mentioned above had an average ERA+ of 113 in their last NL stop before moving to the AL (this would be the Cubs for Clement, the Marlins for Pavano and Burnett and the Astros for Miller). In their first year after switching leagues, that number fell to 99. Also, while only two of the four saw a spike in their home run rate, all four struck out fewer batters per nine innings than they did in their last year in the NL (a pretty significant fall, from an average of 7.75 to 6.50). Now, three of the four pitchers had injury problems that might have contributed to the drop-off, but Penny is not exactly Mr. Durable--he's started 30 or more games in just four of his nine pro seasons.

To simplify, the baseline of what to expect from Penny is about a 12 percent decline in his ERA+ with the Dodgers (107) and a strikeout rate that is 16 percent lower. In other words, it's unlikely that he's going to be a top-notch starter in his first year coming back from injuries in a new league.

A couple of things surprised me when I was looking this stuff up. First of all, I don't quite know why Brad Penny is seen as having all this upside. He's already in his 30s, and he's been more than five percent better than the league-average pitcher three times in his career. In only two of those seasons did he start at least 30 games. His ERA+ with the Dodgers (who play in Chavez Ravine, a pretty good park for pitchers) was 107, and his career NL ERA+ is 106. The only year he received any Cy Young votes was in 2007, when he finished third. He also doesn't strike out nearly as many guys as you would expect a guy with his arsenal of pitches to--just 6.3 Ks per 9 innings in his career, and 5.8 during that '07 season. And for good measure, Penny's career record in 23 starts against AL teams is 7-11 with a 5.08 ERA. Nothing to brag about, in other words.

Here's something else interesting: Both Clement and Miller pitched for the Red Sox during their first year in the AL, and neither panned out. Penny isn't supposed to be the long-term solution that Clement was, but $5 million plus incentives for one year isn't exactly chump change. (Miller only got around $1.5 million.)

Boston is hoping Penny gives them 25-30 starts and gives them some stability in the back of the rotation. Penny is only on a one-year contract, so he will have some motivation. (This is where the Millwood comparison is apt, because Millwood led the AL in ERA for the Indians in his first year in the AL. He parlayed that into a huge contract in Texas and has been below average ever since.)

So it's a pretty low-risk, high-reward situation--the kind general manager Theo Epstein loves. But if you look at his other veteran starting pitcher projects, none of them have really paid off: Miller, Bartolo Colon, Julian Tavarez and Jason Johnson are some recent examples. Epstein doesn't really have that great of a track record with his bullpen flyers, either--Byung-Hyun Kim, Chad Fox, Ramiro Mendoza, Matt Mantei, Rudy Seanez, Brendan Donnelly, Joel Pineiro, Eric Gagne--so that might not bode well for Takashi Saito.

Hopefully he can get keep them on track tonight and give the Red Sox their first winning streak of the season, but with his injury history and the track records of pitchers who make the switch to the AL, expecting him to hold up and/or be effective for the whole season is probably unlikely. I don't blame Epstein for trying to find a reliable fifth starter after the Clay Buchholz fiasco of last season, but I don't think Penny is the answer. Maybe he's just hoping that Penny gives the Sox two good months an bridges the gap until John Smoltz gets off the Disabled List--though it's not like he's a sure thing, either.

I still say that the guy who should be the fifth starter is sitting in the bullpen, and he had a great audition the other night replacing Dice-Walk. With a bullpen as deep as the Boston's is, there's no reason to have a promising young starter like Justin Masterson wasting away.

--Danny Daly (ddaly06)