EagleNYC {l Wrote}:And the Curt Shilling line was joke, right Nick?
It was a joke to illustrate a point. My point is that it's silly to attempt to draw conclusions from performances in which a pitcher is injured. To a degree, you refuted it in your subsequent post.
Even removing Beckett's first half, it looks to me to be an aberration (although 2006 was bad, he still won 16 games...and, further, he bounced back with a dominant 2007). AJ Burnett has been much more up and down over the course of his career. There's a reason Beckett has a .600 winning percentage for his career and Burnett barely hovers over .500. I don't expect Beckett to be in 2007 form, but I do expect him to fall back to his mean. His mean has without question been historically better than Burnett's mean. I'll grant you that I do expect Burnett to be better in 2011 than he was in 2010, as does Joe Girardi: http://www.newsday.com/sports/baseball/ ... -1.2528415.
As you may have noticed, I'm a Sox fan, but I don't believe I'm wearing Sox glasses.