| 23 October 2010
Before the 2010 baseball season began, we asked you guys to make your predictions for the expected starting roster. It's time to look back and see who knew their 2010 Red Sox the best.
Clay Buchholz (read my original prediction post here)
Below you'll find Buchhy's actual 2010 stats in RED, my predictions in italics and the Fan Projections.
In April, we watched Buchholz earn a starting spot in the rotation over veteran Tim Wakefield. After repeatedly refusing to trade him for a big bat or a proven starter, it looked like we were finally going to see what Theo Epstein had always seen in Buchholz... but even Theo had to be pleasantly surprised to see Buchholz as a Cy Young contender when September rolled around.
Judging by the Projections, most of you were surprised as well.
I expected Buchholz to stay healthy and log 30 starts, but I did not expect him to average 6.2 innings per start after struggling to stay in control for more than 5 innings in seasons past. As the chart shows, most of us predicted between 150 and 200 innings for Buchhy and the average worked out to be just a few innings off the mark. We also had five players guess the correct number of games started, so we seemed to have Buchholz sized up pretty well.
Or so we thought...
Buchholz finished with a 17-7 record, and while we did have five players guess within one win of 17, the avaerage was closer to 13. Dick H. was closest, guessing 16-8 with 28 starts. Athosgec2 was also close with 16-8, but predicted 32 starts. And elbarto32_85 (18-6) and jkargerum13 (18-8) were close as well, but weren't as close in other categories.
If a starter has 3 or 4 years of major league experience, you can usually come cloe on a W-L prediction, but after two roller-coaster years, Buchholz came into his own in 2010 and most of us didn't expect a Cy Young caliber season. Hence the 13 win average and the 3.76/1.31 ERA and WHIP averages. Coming into this season, Buchholz had finished with a 6.75 ERA in 2008 and a 4.21 ERA in 2009... no on could have predicted he'd finish 2nd in the AL with a 2.33 ERA.
But pvigean1 came close at 2.50 and 1.30. ggtroy and elbarto32_85 nailed the WHIP at 1.20, but despite allowing 67 walks, Buchholz held opponents to .226 BAA and just 142 hits, thanks to 50.8% ground ball rate.
Lastly, we look at the strikeouts. Before 2010, Buchholz looked like he had the stuff to tally 150+ Ks in a season, but his new approach induced more contact and less swings and misses, and he finished with just 120 Ks on the year. He had one double-digit K game against the Rangers in April and a few 8 K games along the way, but Buchhy typically hovered around 5 Ks per game, so our average of 158 was a little high. treeroot7 was closest at 131 and 27 starts and RedSoxTalk came close as well at 135 and 27.
Bottom Line: We had a few players with exact or close guesses in two categories, but no one guessed close enough across the board, so we're going to mail out some Red Sox stickers frm SoxStickers.com to Dick H., Bill M. and pvigean1.
Stay tuned for the next breakdown: Daisuke Matsuzaka
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