I mentioned something similar on another thread, but Fenway's park effect makes all our pitchers look worse. Last year Fenway was second only to Coors Field for the worst park for pitchers, with a 108 park factor:
https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/leaderboard/statcast-park-factors?type=year&year=2023&batSide=&stat=index_wOBA&condition=All&rolling=&sort=3&sortDir=desc
At Fenway, even though there were a below average number of HRs hit, there were a ton more doubles. That adds up to a higher run scoring environment than almost anywhere else.
This has to be accounted for when trying to evaluate players to bring in or keep.
The Padres, A's, Rays and Mets all had home park factors of 96 or below. The Rockies, Red Sox, Reds were all 106 or higher.
As an example, all those young Seattle pitchers look great, but their home park had a factor of 92 last year, 16 units better for pitchers than Fenway-- it was the lowest of all the regular MLB stadiums.
The Brewers were at 97 last year, so for example adding Burnes or Woodruff, you'd expect them to suffer a bit moving to a home park that is 11 units higher.
The park-adjusted ERA+ numbers on Baseball Reference show that most of the pitchers we are bringing back weren't as awful as they seemed last year. And that doesn't even factor in our horrendous defense last year:
https://theathletic.com/4930953/2023/10/05/red-sox-bad-defense-trevor-story/
The eye test would be enough for any spectator to know the
Red Sox had a rough season on defense, but the underlying statistics are even worse. The Red Sox finished last in the majors by a wide margin with negative-51 Outs Above Average this season. The number looks that much more awful when compared to the second-worst team, the
Reds, who posted a negative-36 OAA.
Not only were this year’s Red Sox awful compared to their peers this season, they rank as one of the worst defensive teams since Statcast started tracking OAA in 2016. Of the 240 teams tracked in that span, the 2023 Red Sox rank 239th. The 2017 Mets with negative-58 OAA were the only team worse.
The park and defense made our pitchers look worse than they actually were. We also had a quarter of our innings pitched by other guys (Kluber, etc.) who were definitely terrible under any circumstances, but almost all of them are gone already. Reducing the number of innings pitched by scrubs is a big need, but we already have quite a few guys in house who were above average last year by ERA+.
IMO the main goal in terms of adding pitchers is to get in at least one guy who is expected to be good and is likely to throw 180 or so innings. That alone would be huge for the whole staff.
Just don't expect that new guy to have an ERA under 3.00 or maybe even 3.50 pitching here. Any pitchers we bring in could very well likely have clearly worse numbers here than with their previous teams just due to the Fenway factor, even if we improve the defense and they throw the ball just as well as they did before.
To help the pitching, the defense has to be fixed. I'm hoping that Story and Rafaella play a lot of innings of defense this year and that we add a good fielder at 2B. If all 3 of those happen, along with some improvement from other guys from really bad to decent, that could transform the entire defense. But none of that is set yet.
Hopefully Breslow and Bailey will have a positive effect on the staff as well.
But I don't think we necessarily need to add 2 really good starters. If we did that but didn't improve the defense, then those 2 guys will likely be really disappointing and look like busts in their first season here. Add one guy who throws 180 good innings and also get better on D, and the whole staff would look much better, despite the park effects issue.
Park factors also indicate that our offense wasn't as good as it seemed last year and needs significant improvement as well, but that's a topic for a different thread.
