By Blaidd Drwg

Brad Mills is apparently going to move starting pitcher Brett Myers into the closer role for 2012. To me, this move does not make a ton of sense. The Astros traded their closer from 2011, Mark Melancon, to the Red Sox in the offseason.  Melancon, while not great, is serviceable and cheap. Additionally, the 2011 offseason had a ton of closer/closer candidates available, and you could easily pick up someone for around 3 -5 million on a one year deal. Maybe the Astros didn’t have the budget for it. They probably have someone in their organization who can fill the role at league minimum if need be, but I guess management doesn’t think they are ready.

Enter in Brett Myers. He has racked up 440 innings over the last 2 seasons with an ERA just under 4, and is slated to make about 11 million next season, probably more than you want to pay him, but you are going to pay him that unless you can find someone to take that contract. I guess that Mills doesn’t think Myers will be better than the other 5 guys in their rotation. Here is who they are going to be starting, with their 2011 numbers. Keep in mind that Myers is the only Astros starter who did not miss a turn in the rotation last season and lead the team in innings for the last 2 season.

I can understand giving Weiland and Lyles a shot, they are both young and the Astros are not going anywhere in 2012, so why not. Norris and Rodriguez are both locked in at the top of the rotation, so it comes down to Happ vs Myers. Other than being 2 years younger than Myers, there isn’t much difference between the two; they have almost identical rate stats over their careers. Wouldn’t it make more sense to let Happ, Myers, Lyles and Weiland compete for the remaining 3 spots in the rotation and figure out your closer situation later? I can almost guarantee that either Lyles or Weiland will be pitching in AAA before the middle of May, if not sooner, which will then mean you will need a replacement starter. I would guess that starter would ultimately be Brett Myers.

By Blaidd Drwg

With a teary farewell, Jason Varitek finally hung up his gear and called it a career. You will get the few idiots in Boston saying he was a Hall of Fame player (not even close), the same way you had them in NY when Posada retired earlier this off season, but generally he did have a pretty good career …with the bat.

Varitek produced an oWAR of 23.7 according to baseball-reference.com. That is a pretty good number for a catcher. He had 3 pretty good seasons from 2003-2005, but generally he was league average or worse. The nice thing about the Red Sox lineup for the first decade of this century is that league average production out of your catcher made him look great in the runs and RBI departments. His post season numbers were pretty much in line with his regular season ones, so he was nothing special in that arena.

Varitek gets a great deal of credit for how he handled the pitching staff. There is no real evidence to suggest that a catcher has any impact on the performance of a pitcher, so I won’t say that he was or wasn’t a great handler of pitchers. Defensively though, he was atrocious at throwing out baserunners – at 23% for his career. In his last 2 seasons, baserunners were successful in 107 out of 128 attempts, or 84% of the time. The league average success rate is somewhere around 73%. That really doesn’t tell the whole story. Varitek was behind the plate for 850 inning in 2010-2011, or roughly 94 full games. Runners attempting over 1 steal per game against him is extremely high.

I don’t blame this all on Varitek; for years the Red Sox pitching coaches had an aversion to holding on runners, which lead to more steal attempts against the Sox then probably should have been attempted. Still, some of the blame falls on the catcher, and Varitek was really bad at throwing runners out.