Media Notes: Gary Tanguay's research on Josh Beckett's numbers is quite terrible

Josh Beckett is the man even when he goes more than 200 innings.

On the early Monday edition of Comcast Sports New England’s Sports Tonight, co-host Gary Tanguay brought up concerns about Josh Beckett going into the postseason, specifically citing Beckett’s lack of success when he goes over 200 innings pitched in a season.

To paraphrase, Tanguay said that he simply wasn’t the same pitcher after he crossed that threshold. To be quite blunt, that is a ridiculous statement and simply not true.

Beckett has thrown more than 200 innings only three times in his nine-year career: 2006, 2007 and 2009. His regular season numbers in those years:

2006: 16-11, 5.01 ERA, 158 K’s, 74 walks in 204.2 innings (33 starts)

2007: 20-7, 3.27 ERA, 194 K’s, 40 walks in 200.2 innings (30 starts). He finished 2nd in the Cy Young voting and 22nd overall in the AL MVP vote.

2009: 17-6, 3.86 ERA, 199 K’s, 55 walks in 212.1 innings (32 starts)

So looking at these numbers, I guess I’m not seeing a trend of bad pitching. 2006 was his first season in the American League, so there’s going to be a transition year. 2007? Please. 2009? Despite a few bumps late in the season, how do you complain about those numbers?

With that myth debunked, perhaps Tanguay was referring to Beckett’s postseason performance when he goes over 200 innings. Alright then, let’s see the numbers.

2006: Boston didn’t make the playoffs.

2007: 4-0, 1.20 ERA, 35 K’s, 2 walks in 30 innings (four starts)

2009: His first start is Saturday.

Uhhh…what the hell was Tanguay trying to say? If there’s a point to be made, it’s that there could be concern over Beckett’s workload in the postseason considering he had a career-high in innings pitched this year and that last year’s playoffs weren’t that great for him. But he instead made a statement with no statistical backup and no one called him out on it…until now.

It took me roughly two minutes to look up Beckett’s stats and easily disprove Tanguay’s theory. And he’s the guy getting paid to be on TV and the radio? This was the same guy who said the Red Sox weren’t going to make the playoffs after their mid-summer swoon. Guess he was wrong there too.

C’mon Gary. You’re better than this.

Josh Nason is the main writer for Small White Ball, a New England-based sports and media blog on the MVN Network. Reach him via Twitter or josh [at] smallwhiteball [dot-com].