The Year of the Dice Man

The 2008 Red Sox season may very well hinge on the ability of Dice-K to live up to his potential. With Big Schilly on the sidelines for a majority of the season the pitching staff is now focused entirely on Beckett and Dice-K. I thought that last year was a good year for the Dice man, very similar to the year Beckett had two years ago. However, the thing that scares me more than anything about Dice-K is his seeming lack of a go-to pitch. Every great pitcher has that one pitch, or in some cases two or three pitches, that they go to when it comes time for the crunch. When Pedro used to get two strikes on a lefty everyone watching the game knew he was going to throw his changeup down and away and it still worked most of the time. If Big Schilly needed a big pitch it usually came down to his splitter. I still believe that Papelbon could tell the batters that his fastball is coming and it wouldn't matter. Not a single pitch in Dice-K's repertoire left me with this impression last year. The fastball is a little above average but sometimes he seems to lose control of it. The slider, which seemed to me to be his best pitch when he could locate it, didn't get used enough. And of course the fabled gyro-ball that we heard so much about but never really saw. From everything I've read about his time in Japan Dice-K definitely has this 'out' pitch somewhere in his repertoire and the Red Sox season may go as far as that pitch takes him. If he can even come close to replicating the success that Beckett had in his second year than the Red Sox will be well on their way to defending their title.