12eight

But wait, you say!  What about Daniel Cabrera?  What about Brandon McCarthy, Joe Blanton, and Ervin Santana?  What about Kirk Saarloos?!?  It's true.  All of these pitchers, who most fans had never heard of before they watched them strike out Manny Ramirez, pitched quite well against us, in at least one game this season.  We've since come to expect it; if you've never heard of them, the Sox can't hit them.

Now, I've heard this before.  Last season, it was Scott Kazmir leading the charge.  The year before that it popped up as well.  Beyond that, my memory gets hazy on the subject, but it's entirely possible this assertion has been around since the first rookie got hazed.  However, it seems to have taken on new life this year.  I wanted to see if it was because we really have done far worse vs. rookie pitchers, or if this was just a thing, like 'The Sox leave way too many guys on base' or 'Manny doesn't hustle, get rid of him', or even 'Roger Clemens is in the twilight of his career'.

So, as I tend to do, I fired up MS Excel and ESPN's sortable stats page, and started stealing data. 

First things first: how did I decide what games to look at?  Basically, I was of two minds here.  For one thing, a lot of this seems to be 'so-and-so who I've never heard of beat us'.  But going through game logs to find guys that most people hadn't heard of seemed a touch subjective here; I'm sure a lot of people watching last night hadn't heard of Joe Blanton, but he's been a top prospect for a while, and has had a stellar year.  Going strictly with rookies, however, would have given me way too small a sample size to work with; of the 29 pitchers (39 starts) I ended up looking at, only 4 were actually rookies (in that they had never pitched in the bigs before this season).  I settled on pitchers that had, prior to 2005, thrown less than 200 innings at the big league level.  What I got was a pretty fair cross-section of pitchers; I looked at the games they pitched vs. the Sox in 2005, their entire 2005 season, and their career record.

So, first, let's just put the most damning number on the table and get it over with.  In 2005, vs. the Boston Red Sox, pitchers who had previously thrown less than 200 MLB innings did this:

GS W  L  IP    H   BB  K   R   ER  ERA  RERA WHIP K/9
39 10 14 193.2 206 107 126 134 121 5.62 6.23 1.62 5.86

Not exactly Cy material right there.  I looked at that data, and I thought about how we could all be so absolutely certain of a thing, yet have that thing turn out to be so completely and totally wrong.  Because, really, there's no way to fudge those numbers.  You can't separate out the Brandon McCarthy's from the Ricardo Rodriguez's and the Sean Douglass's.  The group of pitchers we bitch about is 'unknown pitchers', and there they are.  so, have we at least done worse against them relative to the rest of the league as we have with other pitchers?  In other words, these guys might not be dominant against us, but are they at least better than they should be, given how we manhandle the rest of the league?

MLB Pitchers  W    L    W%   ERA   WHIP  K/9   K/BB
vs. Total     2189 2189 .500 4.29  1.37  6.35  2.02
vs. Boston    61   85   .418 5.27  1.57  6.60  1.61
% Change                84%  123%  115%  104%  80% 

<200 IP       W    L    W%   ERA   WHIP  K/9   K/BB
vs. Total     170  189  .474 4.69  1.62  5.97  1.18
vs. Boston    10   14   .417 5.62  1.43  5.86  1.62
% Change                88%  120%  112%  98%   73% 

There's a dip in those percentages... but not very much of one.  The league's ERA vs. Boston is 123% higher than it's average ERA, but with the rookies, it's 120%.  115% WHIP to 112%.  Rookie pitchers actually do strike us out slightly more often than they do the league, while we strike out slightly less vs. all pitchers than the league does.  We do walk somewhat more often vs. the rookies, though, both in general and in comparison to the league.  There's a slight drop, but not nearly enough to account for the fact that we still essentially baste rookie pitchers and eat them for dinner.

And, seriously, let's look at these numbers again:

GS W  L  IP    H   BB  K   R   ER  ERA  RERA WHIP K/9
39 10 14 193.2 206 107 126 134 121 5.62 6.23 1.62 5.86

That's just plain ridiculous.  That's 39 different games, by 29 different pitchers.  So, what in god's name could account for the absolute, dead-on certainty of many Sox fans concerning our "terrible" performance against these guys?

Two things.  First, in the above 39 games, we have won 21.  Though the starting pitchers listed above have a 10-14 (.417) record against us, their teams in those games have an 18-21 (.462) record.  Why?  Well, mostly - okay, entirely - because of our pitching, and especially our bullpen.  They blew the games early, but we blew them late.  of those 39 games, our opposing pitchers had 15 no-decisions.

The other is simply how memory works.  We don't remember the pitchers we bomb (unless they're Yankees).  There's no reason for us to; they haven't implanted themselves on our consciousness.  They showed up, we slapped them silly, they left, and there were still 5 or 6 innings to go.  But the guys that dominated us?  McCarthy, Saarloos, Santana, Blanton, et. al.? We remember the losses, and we remember that we were sitting there thinking 'who is this guy and why has he only given up 3 hits?'  We notice the unexpected far more than the expected.

So, the next time you hear someone tell you that the Sox suck against rookie pitchers, ask them what Blue Jay started that Patriots' Day 12-7 win over Toronto.  What's that?  You don't remember?  It was Dave Bush, who had pitched all of 102 ML innings before 2005, and who went 2 innings, allowing 7 earned runs. 

Rookies.

Update: Naturally, as I was writing this, FelixMantilla on Sons of Sam Horn began a thread on the exact same topic.  Their stuff is here - different conclusions, though, because it seems like they're using odd search parameters.

If for some ungodly reason you want to actually look at the data I used, click here.  It's the Excel file I put together - this will ask you to download a file, so be warned.  It also might take freakin' forever to load.