Over the past decade, offensive prowess became synonymous with winning baseball. The AL East titans, the Red Sox and Yankees engaged in a race to install bashers at each of the nine positions in the batting order. The rest of Major League Baseball, at least the teams that wanted to contend, followed a similar track.
This was, of course, a direct result of the “Better Baseball through Chemicals,” strategy that the players had adopted and MLB Executives pretended not to see. So, then, it should come as no surprise that this trend seems to be reversing now that MLB decided, at Congressional gunpoint, to clean up the game.
Leading the way is one of the former AL East Muscle Beach competitors, the Boston Red Sox. Jason Bay, arguably the most powerful Boston bat last season, was allowed to board the Acela Express to New York to join the Mets. The Sox countered by signing 37 year old centerfielder, Mike Cameron who, despite his advanced baseball age, is still considered to be among the better defensive MLB outfielders. What he is not, is an offensive player on Bay’s level.
The Red Sox did not bank the money they saved on what would have been an expensive contract for Bay, rather, they bolstered an already impressive pitching staff by signing the Angels’ number one starter, John Lackey. In the discussion of the best starting staffs in MLB, its difficult to argue against a team that trots out Josh Beckett, Jon Lester and Lackey at the top of the rotation.
In the infield, injuries and age have reduced Mike Lowell, once a productive player on both sides of the ball, to a stationary defender with an average bat. Off season rumors had the Sox in hot pursuit of the San Diego Padres’ slugging superstar first baseman, Adrian Gonzalez. Whether the rumors were accurate or not, the deal did not materialize.
So what did GM Theo Epstein do? Find another slugging corner infielder? That would have been so 2009. Epstein signed Adrian Beltre, perhaps the best defensive third baseman in MLB today, to a one year contract. Yet another indication of the philosophical change taking hold over on Yawkey Way.
“We needed to improve our run prevention,” Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein said in December when Cameron was introduced to the Boston media.
There is a fear among Boston fans and media outlets that Theo’s sudden emphasis on gloves over bats is more a result of his failure to add bats to a lineup that silently perished at the hands of the Angels in last year’s ALDS while batting, as a team, far south of the Mendoza Line.
It should be noted that Epstein is not the only MLB executive who has fallen in love with defense and pitching. According to self appointed baseball genius and Oakland A’s GM Billy Beane, his club and division rival Seattle Mariners are charting a similar course to the Red Sox.
“At the end of the day, if you score 500 runs in a season and your opponents score 400 runs in a season, it’s the same as scoring 1000 and giving up 900,” Beane told Sports Illustrated. ”It’s still ultimately a zero-sum game. You try to use some equation, and some combination, that allows you to succeed. For us and the Mariners, it’s defense.”
After delivering two World Series trophies, Epstein was viewed as something as a baseball savant by the once jaded Red Sox fandom. “In Theo, we trust,” replaced, “Wait til Next Year,” as New England’s official baseball motto.
Should the Red Sox stumble out of the gate, it won’t take long for the Nation to turn on the Boy Wonder as quickly as it anointed him as the chosen one. Time will tell whether Run Prevention was an effective strategy or just a desperate attempt to explain away Epstein’s inability to improve an offense that often times 2009, seemed powerless against good pitching.
Those of us old enough to remember when pitching and defense truly did win championships would welcome a return to an MLB in which it takes more than chemically ehnaced offense to be the last team standing
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