His Red Sox career ERA before 2010 was 4.05..
Lackeys ERA and WHIP have gone UP every single year over those 3 years.. Every single year he's pitched worse than the year prior.
Felger and Mazz are down on the Sox, however have you noticed a theme? Everyone is down on the Sox. They were in first place on July 2nd and their ratings were really low by their standards.
Without really going back and forth forever about Lackey and Beckett you gotta acknowledge that the interest in the team is waining for whatever reason. Felger/Mazz and I'm sure a bunch of other people atribute this fact to the players this team keeps signing.
Maybe it is wrong, maybe it is right. What we know for a fact is that NESN ratings are no where near what they use to be and there is a reason for that.
The reason for that is a team devoid of almost anyone they recognized, struggling to stay in contention. Except they were in contention. Mostly on the backs of Theo Epstein's signings.
Let me itemize my issues point by point:
1) John Lackey- It's the first year of his contract. He got off to a lousy start, and his numbers for the year don't look that great. But let's break down how he finished the year.
June- 3.86 ERA, with a 3.58 BABIP
July- 3.67 ERA with a 2.86 BABIP
August- 5.75 ERA with a
.376 BABIP
September/October- 3.46 with a .286 BABIP
Was he an ace? Of course not. But let's not act like he was Gil Meche here. He was a solid #3 starter, which is about what most of us expected out of him. Did we pay more than he was probably worth? Yes, but that's almost always going to be the Big Market Tax. The Yankees deal with it, we deal with it, the Mets deal with it. My point? It's year 1 of his contract. Give him at least one more year. He had a horrible start, but bounced back just fine.
2) Josh Beckett- I'm not going to go into this, other than to see that he was coming off 3 straight 5 f-WAR seasons, heading into a market that was (projected) to be basically him and Cliff Lee as the only two ace pitchers on the market. They made a pre-emptive strike and signed a contract that would have looked like a steal had he kept up his prior production.
3) Theo's signings in general, and the ratings- This year, they lost a 6 f-WAR player (Youkilis), a 5 f-WAR player (Pedroia) a 2.7 -fWAR player (Ellsbury), a 4.4 f-WAR player (Mike Cameron) for the season, with a 4 f-WAR player (Victor Martinez) missing about a month. That's quite likely to be the reason the ratings went down. In all seriousness, you could look at the starting field and see precisely ONE regular starter who was here last year, and that's everyone's favorite whipping boy, JD Drew. Starting pitchers who aren't Pedro aren't usually a draw, and even if they are, they're a draw once in every 5 games. And despite ALL of that, the Red Sox were still in the playoff hunt deep into the playoffs, in a division with the 2 best regular season teams in baseball, and still finished just shy of 90 wins. There are maybe 4 or 5 GMs who had a better season than Epstein this season, and that's counting your World Series winner, who had a massive string of misfirings simply not come and bite him in the ass, and the simple luck of being in the NL West allowing him to race back to grab that playoff spot. I am quite honestly struggling to find a team that's had a better 7 year run than the Red Sox, and since 2007, outside of the 3 world series winners and Tampa, another team with even a better 3 year window.
*edit* Forgot my main point.
This year is an outlier. It's not in line with their prior history of product. They didn't suffer because a) players who projected very well had poor seasons, or b) projectable injuries occurred. It was an aberration. Let's see what happens next year.