Amalie Benjamin writes a piece this morning about the Red Sox starters and the improvement coming from the rotation over the last several games.  Its still way early to determine whether the better control and the deeper inning count is a true trend for 2009 or just a fluke in this stretch of games.  If its not a true trend, the Sox bullpen is going to be hurting come July, that’s for sure.

But one of the things I learned a few weeks ago from a friend in another American League front office, is that in planning for a season, often the front office guys look at the innings they have to fill and figure out if they have the pitching to do that.  Now, I think we might all realize this goes on roughly, or theoretically.  But in reality, somewhere for every team there are white boards with charts and schedules.  Those contain some representation of every inning for every game expected to be played and who will be pitching in those games.  Now, no one can forsee rainouts or extra innings.  A team can’t know when they won’t have to pitch the bottom of the inning on the road, etc.  But assuming 9 innings in every game, a general manager team makes a plan for every inning of every game in the off-season.  They have a pretty good idea who can consistently give them 6 innings or 7 or 5.  Then, the fill the bullpen.  Young pitchers aren’t going to last through the whole season, so who is at AAA that can come up in September and make a few starts, or who is there that can come up in July and make a spot start.

The team can look at the end of every week and see how close or how far they are away from their forecast, and can begin to make a plan to fill the necessary innings that they need, perhaps weeks in advance. Let’s be clear.  The manager isn’t making game decisions based on this chart.  He’s making the best decsion he can at the time, but when you hear that the manager can only play the cards he is dealt, those cards are based at least loosely on the chart.  What I am talking about is a tool that a front office uses to make sure they have the depth and the development plan for the season.

Think about the adage that a guy who loses 20 games has to be a pretty good pitcher, because if he isn’t, if he can’t keep his team in the game, then he loses his chance to start.  Though this is pretty much true, in the modern era of baseball, he might be run out there still to protect a young arm and to eat innings. It’s like the guy who gives up 10 runs early, and has to stay out there to soak up the loss and save the bullpen for more effective days.

When you look at Boston, and say Justin Masterson, you have no way of knowing if he has pitched more or less than the smart guys in the front office thought he would, but chances are they knew he would fill a fairly large number of innings at some point this season.  With so much in baseball being unpredictable over the course of a long season, no one can know if a pre-season plan to fill those innings will work.  How the team interacts to the plan, how loyal they are to it and how well thought out it was to begin with can determine the teams success both this year, but also the team’s long term ability to plan.

The Orioles might be a good example, since they are a team at the whim of the owner.  If they plan preseason to give one of their young starters extra days between starts, but because of that pitchers success change the plan to use him more often so the team has a better chance to win, that could burn out that young pitching arm early in his career.  That only hurts the team long-term.  Skipping the young promising arm and letting an Adam Eaton type guy go out there no matter what, benefits the club long term, though fans may not see it that way when they show up at the ballpark and see Eaton on the mound.

So that’s along way to go to say, as I read Amalie’s piece this morning, I wondered how far away from Boston’s organizational plan they are right now.  That’s the information that would make for an interesting piece. Oh, and its also the piece that would change the sports betting lines for each team as well.