Black Betsy

One of the things I keep track of on the sidebar of Black Betsy is the
Sox's performance in each 10 game segment (games 1-10, 11-20), etc. As I
mentioned in one of my first posts, it's nice to break the season up into
these mini-seasons to track how hot/not the team has been. My good friend
and colleague Brad (a Mets fan) looked at the Sox's first nine segments and
said this to me on IM:

Brad: so I looked at your 10 game segment list on your
blog.....
Brad: I have to say....that is the most mediocre series of 10 game
segments I could possibly imagine
Brad: I suppose one could say that 6-4s are good because, win 60% of
your games and you are in the playoffs...but still, not one
stretch where they show any dominance....

And he's exactly right. In fact, if you look closely, the Sox were pretty
good during the early part of the schedule, but peaked out at
29-21 after the first 5 ten game segments. In the 41 games
since, they are 20-21. That's OK baseball, that's .500
baseball, but it's not going to win the Sox the AL Central.
There's no question that the Sox need to step it up.

Brad's follow up points were these:

Brad: I view 16 segments half of which are 6-4s and half of
which are 5-5s as essentially just biding time to get knocked
out by a better team if you limp into the playoffs.
Brad: (only confirmed by the fact that they are 17-8 against the weak
central and under .500 against everyone else)
Brad: (add in the fact that they would most probably not have home
field any series in the playoffs and are 21-25 on the
road...yuck!)

I part ways with Brad here, because once the Sox get in the playoffs, a
different set of rules are in place. There are no fifth
starters in the playoffs. The Sox are only 7 games over .500
because their 5th starters have been horrible - 2-9. Make that
5-6, and the Sox are 10 games over .500, 2.5 games up on the
Twinkies, right there with the Rangers for home field in the
first round, and looking good going into the downhill part of
the schedule.