I’ve always been fascinated by disasters: Hurricanes, tornadoes, the Hindenburg, Titanic, 9/11, wars, engineering failures, the list goes on. The bigger this disaster, the more I’m drawn to it. They’re compelling not only because of the long list of factors that usually have to line up to cause the catastrophe, but also because they provide a blueprint into how to prepare for the next one, or even outright prevent it.
So I guess it’s rather perfect that I’m a fan of the Boston Red Sox. Few organizations in sports do disaster quite like this one. Even after four World Series titles in the John Henry era, this team still has that thing in their DNA that when they start going bad, things explode in spectacular and catastrophic fashion.
This April has been a special level of disaster across the board, and one of the disasters within the disaster has been Brayan Bello. I mean, what the hell is going on with this guy? He was a competent starter just last summer, and now he’s a straight up arsonist on the mound.
Yesterday, he went into the game against the Blue Jays with a 9.00 ERA, and it went UP! And if that wasn’t enough to raise your blood pressure, he pouted all the way off the mound when Chad Tracy went to go get him in an attempt to keep the game in hand (although some would argue that with this offense the score was already insurmountable).
There have been so many hideous surprises with the Sox this year that I don’t think we’ve really gotten enough time to fully digest how insanely terrible Brayan Bello has been out of the gate. It’s been one gutless performance after the next, and it usually comes attached with an attitude that’s been almost as lousy as the pitching.
In six starts, he has the second highest ERA of any Red Sox starter through that many games in a season in franchise history. He’s failed to make it through the five innings in all but one outing, he completely lost track of the count in the game in Houston, and the team has a run differential of negative 20 in his starts.
If you want to go back even further, this garbage started in his outing in the postseason last October against the Yankees when he was bounced after just 2.1 innings in a sneaky bleak and borderline abysmal performance. As I wrote in January about that game when I wanted to trade him:
Bello faced just 11 batters, failed to get five of them out, didn’t strike out a soul, couldn’t keep Ben Rice in the ballpark, and was largely saved from complete disaster by an Anthony Volpe double play in the second inning, and Alex Cora’s quick hook in the third.
This is crazy to think about when you consider Bello had a 3.32 ERA last year and made it through at least five innings in 23 of his 28 starts. Now he’s so terrible and unreliable, the Sox need to find a way to get him out of the rotation as soon as possible before he can do any more damage. He’s not just losing games, he’s making them completely unwinnable even if most of the rest of the roster would happen to do their job.
But of course, because this is Red Sox baseball and they’re prone to disasters, they pretty much have to let Brayan Bello make his next start with Garrett Crochet going on IL. Since the rotation is also without Johan Oviedo, Patrick Sandoval, Kutter Crawford, Tanner Houck, and Tyler Uberstine and has to wait until May 6th before Sonny Gray is eligible to come off the IL, it creates this really annoying dynamic over the next five games if you want to get Brayan Bello out of the rotation.
If you assume Jake Bennett makes his major league debut on Friday at Fenway and then the other three healthy starters just follow suit, it leaves you one game short of getting back to Gray’s date. Here’s how it breaks down with Bello having to fill that May 5th game in Detroit.
This is really annoying because with the off day today, it feels like there should be some way to manipulate things and get Bello off the carousel, but short of a rainout, there’s just one too many games to cover.
So it would seem the only other option here would be to go with a bullpen game since Bello pretty much makes every game he starts a mini bullpen game anyway, right?
Well, not exactly. If you take a look at the how opposing starters are lining up for the next handful of games, the Red Sox are once again likely to catch reigning Cy Young Award winner Tarik Skubal on the Monday, May 4th game. This presents Boston with a unique opportunity to pull off an Art of War trick by using today’s off day to move up Brayan Bello’s next start to Monday where he’d still be on normal rest. (And really, rest should be no problem because he only lasted 63 pitches in Wednesday’s atrocious outing anyway.)
I mean, if you likely to lose any game of that Detroit series where Skubal or Bello starts, why not put them on the same day? If your opponent has an Ace of Spades on the table, you might as well throw out your two of clubs if you have that option. Wouldn’t you much rather lose that Monday game 13-1 and reset things for the rest of the series instead of losing 3-2 on Monday and then something like 12-5 on Tuesday?
Also, Brayan Bello kind of deserves to be fed to the lions — Or I guess Tigers in this case. You put your teammates in a horrible situation time and time again? How about we put you in a horrible situation and make you face Skubal?
After that, if he stinks again and Jake Bennett and Payton Tolle look decent (with both guys going on extra rest in this proposed pitching plan), you can use one of the two options Bello has left and send his unreliable butt down the Mass Pike to Worcester.
