“Warning: Answering questions from a Fire Brand correspondent can cause sudden and season-ending injuries such as running into walls while making spectacular catches. Please direct any and all interview requests through Over the Monster for safer results.”

“Penny and Smoltz were stop gaps until Buchholz and or Bowden/Tazawa were ready to move into a rotation spot.”

Absolutely. Let’s face it, Tazawa isn’t built to last an entire season. Maybe he can grow into that kind of shape, but not yet. Same’s true, maybe to a lesser degree, of Buchholz. Penny/Smoltz were intended to bide time. If one or both actually took hold, great. But what was the alternative? Take a chance on Buchholz/Tazawa from Day One, and then when one or both breaks down after the AS break, what then? Would they be able to pick up a Penny or Smoltz to fill out the season at THAT point? Of course not. As SoxAcumen says, it’s a chess game. (The Sox FO approaches its business much like I suspect the owner’s hedge fund does.)

Penny’s built to be a bullpen arm, not a starter. But he’s in serious denial. Really, he’s his own worst enemy.

And:

“Carl Crawford welcome to Boston…”

Oh, baby! If only. Double steals EVERY night.

but many on this site don’t understand things like this. Funny however, that I had this discussion with RJ after Kazmir’s 3rd start. RJ contended he was a #1 starter, while I thought that was a vast overrating of Kazmir. Of course he wouldn’t say that now, but it is true that 06-07 Kazmir was a very effective starting pitcher. He is past his prime and way overpriced at this stage.

that Smoltz can still pitch. We saw flashes of excellent pitching (not just results) in his starts here, along with big command issues. He lost little velocity on his fastball, and still showed at times a nasty slider and splitter. He was inconsistant to say the least, but what do you expect from a guy who had not pitched in 14 months coming off major surgery? I really do think he could have been effective with us, but it was not clear how long the process was going to be. I wonder if his last bad start was not against the Yankees if the decision would have been so abrupt. If the team didn’t think a pennant race was the place to let a guy work out his command issues (which is logical) they should not have signed him in the first place. Fans on this site are a bit funny. They always want “the next thing;” they are happy when Dice goes down because “we have Smoltz,” then they are happy to dump Smoltz. They are happy when Wake goes down, because “now we get to see Clay.” The want to dump Penny because Tazawa, a raw AA pitcher threw a few lucky games. Then when Tazawa gets the inevitable shelling…well you get the picture. It is one things for fans to have thins kind of mentality, but when it seems to rub off on the FO it is a bit worring.

BTW-one thing that RJ is wrong about is “regression to the mean.” He is misusing this term. The mean that one regresses to is the hypothetical infinite sample mean. We can’t use someone’s 40 inning sample to define that, and as you say, it is not clear what this hypothetical mean is. You can use someones FIP, etc, but these things are also still strongly fluctuating quantities over such a sample size. For example, Smoltz luckily didn’t allow a HR in his first 3+ starts…