That's Baseball

Statistics don't lie. Or do they? The Sox haven't looked like the same team since the All-Star break, going on offensive holiday.

Even for the best baseball teams, losing comes as no stranger. A sixty percent winning percentage translates to 97 wins in the baseball marathon, and currently only the Dodgers and the Yankees have eclipsed that .600 mark.

If we (incorrectly) assumed that each game had the same (forty percent) chance of a loss for the best teams, then a five game losing streak would occur (.4 x .4 x .4 x .4 x .4) or 1% of the time over any five game period. And when you consider the number of teams playing and the length of the season, it's easy to see why losing streaks occur so often.

Nobody thinks that the Red Sox forgot how to hit, but conversely well, your lying eyes didn't deceive you either. Both the "big guns" and the rest of the lineup wasn't operating at a high efficiency level. We don't have invoke Newtonian physics to understand how the team has struggled. The Sox have hit .221 in July with an OPS of .699, and only Dustin Pedroia has hit over .300 (.368) among the regulars. Varitek, Ellsbury, Bay, Green, Lowrie, and Drew have all hit .200 or less in July. Remarkably, the Sox have still outscored opponents 73-71 during that time frame.

Will the Sox make a big trade? I generally favor the "Winner's Curse" theory, that when multiple bidders compete for a limited commodity, they end up overpaying. Young players with low salaries and limited service time have excess value, much like stock options because of the so-called "time value". Also, the money saved by not spending big dollars remains available to either sign your own chips to longer contracts or to compete for free agents.

If your offense can't produce at a higher level, then a surfeit of pitching may not necessarily put the Sox over the top.