Red Sox fire pitching coach Juan Nieves, but that won’t fix rotation woes
Most baseball minds agreed the Boston Red Sox entered 2015 with significant question marks around their pitching staff, specifically their starting rotation.
Well, things have been worse that expected — a lot worse, and pitching coach Juan Nieves is taking the fall.
The Red Sox fired Nieves on Thursday, 28 games into a season in which Boston is 13-15, last in the AL East with the worst team ERA in the American League. The only team ERA worse than Boston’s 4.86 can be found in Colorado, where the ball flies extra far and the Rockies have a 5.23 ERA.
Boston’s starters have been particularly bad, as their 5.54 ERA isn’t that different from Colorado’s 5.59 ERA. The Red Sox’s bullpen is better, at 3.82, 16th in MLB. Nieves was in his third season with the Red Sox. They won the World Series his first season but ranked 23rd in team ERA in 2014. The club said Thursday it has “a small list” of candidates to replace Nieves, but no one has been given the job yet.
The question here has to be: Is Nieves really to blame? Did the Red Sox really not see that their pitching staff could be a mess?
Even the usually-kind Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports got a little snarky on this one:
The Red Sox patch-worked together a pitching staff after they weren’t able to sign Jon Lester in free agency. They mainly looked for pitchers who could eat a lot of innings and acquired Wade Miley (4.34 ERA last season) and Rick Porcello (4.30 career ERA, but a respectable 3.43 last season) in trades. They built around Clay Buchholz (5.34 ERA last season) and Joe Kelly (4.20 last season), then made a risky add in Justin Masterson (5.88 last season). Whaaaat!? You mean that didn’t work out?
And while it’s true the Red Sox don’t have a true ace — maybe they finally get around to addressing that now — they are also relying on a number of pitchers who could be lackluster with a flip of a coin, and that’s what we’ve seen so far.
Maybe Nieves wasn’t getting enough out of the Red Sox pitchers, maybe he wasn’t connecting with the new players, maybe the disappointing Red Sox just needed to pump new life into their clubhouse.
Or, maybe the Red Sox just did a shoddy remodel of their rotation and Nieves is getting taken to the dumps.
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Mike Oz is the editor of Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @MikeOz
