The Dice Man Cometh

When Dice-K took the mound yesterday, I, like most people, had pretty low expectations. Matsuzaka surpassed the lowered expectations by light years, and now has Sox fans feeling uber-confident heading into the playoffs.
It’s generally a bad idea to put too much stock into just one start, but at the same time, this isn’t a rookie that we are blowing out of proportion. Before this year, Dice-K was a known commodity. He won 18 games last year with a sub 3 ERA. Sure, he had issues going deep into games, but he was a great asset as a #3 or #4 starter.
That has been the biggest issue for the Red Sox during the second half of the season. The Yankees leap-frogged the Sox because they were getting much better pitching out of the back end of the rotation. That won’t matter come playoff time, when a team needs only 3 good starters to win. 4 good ones is a luxury.
Matsuzaka gives the Sox that luxury if he continues to pitch the way he did last night, and there is no reason to think that he won’t. His fastball looked as good as I’ve seen it. When he got into trouble, he got big strikeouts to not allow runs across the plate. He pitched with lots of power, and it’s the power pitchers that succeed in October (sorry Paul Byrd).
Beckett seems to have turned the corner, Lester is lights out, and the Clay Buchholz star is beginning to shine brightly. Add Matsuzaka to the mix, and now you have the deepest playoff rotation in the game. Despite all the Yankees success, I would favor the Sox in a playoffs series against them. I’ll take Beckett/Lester/Buchholz/Matsuzaka over Sabathia/Burnett/Pettite/Chamberlain. It’s not a monster advantage, but I think the Sox have an edge there.
The Sox are getting white hot at the right time of year. They have the wild card all but sewn up, and now have addressed their biggest weakness in a big way. They have won six in a row, and they have some pretty bad teams on the schedule ahead, so it doesn’t look like the winning will stop any time soon. The winning that matters doesn’t start until October, but if Dice-K keeps throwing up lines like he did last night (6+ innings, 3 hits, 0 runs), the winning won’t stop then either.