The Dice-Man Crumbleth

If they gave out awards for lame headlines, that might just be the winner this year. Yeesh. Ignoring that for the moment, the point of this post is to tell folks to be alert for opportunities (including tonight) to fade Boston starter Daisuke Matsuzaka in his next few starts. Playing for the Red Sox and boasting a win/loss record of 5-0 and an ERA of 2.43, the opposing team is going to have a big underdog number next to them on your betting ticket for the next several starts. However, these numbers may be more of a mirage than evidence of ace pitching.

Dice-K has been walking a tightrope all season, constantly having to get himself out of bad situations with multiple runners on base. He has managed to escape those spots so far this season, but his luck can't hold out forever. One problem has been his lack of control, as he is walking way too many batters (e.g. 8 walks in his last start). For the season, he has issued 27 walks already in 7 starts. His K/BB is a terrible 33/27 for the year. Sooner or later, he is going to get burned when he loads up the bases with walked batters. Looking at his absurdly low BABIP so far (.184), it appears that he has been extremely lucky so far, and when the balls in play start dropping in for hits, Dice-K is gonna get pounded if he's giving out free passes the way he has been doing recently.

Another big concern with Dice-K has been his high pitch counts. Matsuzaka is averaging 105.4 pitches per start so far, which breaks down to around 18 pitches per inning. He's nibbling at the edges so much, he's not able to go deep into games. Except maybe for Dusty Baker, major league managers are not going to let one of their top pitchers, with a big contract, throw much more than 100 pitches in a game. Dice-K has made it through the 7th inning just once this year, while in four of his seven starts, he has lasted only 5 innings before exiting with a high pitch count. The problem here is magnified when you consider how poorly the Red Sox bullpen is performing. Even before Papelbon just blew back-to-back saves, Boston's bullpen was one of the league's worst. The Red Sox bullpen is now 29th out of 30 teams in ERA this season, and even Papelbon has begun to look human. Dice-K is really hurting his team by leaving the game after only 5 or 6 innings, and turning the ball over to such a poor-performing relief staff. Pretty soon, you can expect all of these negative indicators to converge, with the result being some ugly results for Boston when Matsuzaka starts. Boston backers will feel like they got "unlucky" when it happens, but it will actually be the opposite. You don't want to be the guy holding the Boston -205 bet when it happens.