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Sunday, April 03, 2016

No Pitch

Who's the better pitcher: David Price or Jon Lester?

You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone in baseball who says Lester. Even the Red Sox team, asked who they think the toughest pitcher in baseball is, is more or less divided between Price and Clayton Kershaw. Not a single player answered Lester.

But, per The CHB, the Red Sox should still have Lester, even though if they did, they most certainly would not have Price), and this failing is still worth whining about now two years later. And there's a really weird left turn midway through the piece about the lack of homegrown pitchers.

Here's one of the killer quotes: "The Sox didn’t value pitching over hitting for most of the 20th century. They haven’t had enough pitching for most of their 115 seasons."

 Easy to say, but that assumes that the sole reason the Sox didn't win a World Series between 1918 and 2004 is a lack of pitching. I would argue it's because the Yankees were just too damn good. Keep in mind that only 19 franchises won titles during that 84-year span, and of those, three of them (Angels, Diamondbacks and Royals) won only once, and all in 7 games. Meanwhile, the Yankees were popping champagne 26 times.

So by The CHB's logic, if the Red Sox lacked the pitching to win it all, so did pretty much all the rest of the major leagues.

That's hardly a systemic failing.

Unlike his writing.

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