The Torres Situation

For those of you who have not heard, 26 year old Carlos Torres will start in place of John Danks tomorrow. Let's start out by me telling you who this guy is. Torres was selected by the Sox in the 15th round of the 2004 draft. He is a 6-2, 180 pound, right hander out of Kansas State. He is 8-4 with a 2.20 ERA in Triple-A this year.

There are a bunch of other impressive stats to tell you about, but I'm not going to do that because if he wasn't good, he wouldn't be pitching tomorrow. So now we need to discuss what the situations are with Torres. Of course I hope that he's good and we are put in a situation where we have too many pitchers. If that is the case I think you give Danks another start off, give Clayton his normal start again, and then let Torres start again. But what happens if he doesn't perform right away? Does he get another chance? (can we afford that?), does he go straight back down?, do we rely on Colon to come back?, do we continue with what we were doing?, do we make a trade? I honestly have no clue.


I think the possibilities are endless with this situation. I'm really not sure what the plans, or even why Torres is even getting a shot here. Why not Carrasco, why not Poreda? I hope the reason is that Torres is better than both of them, but I'm not exactly sure that is the case. I think it's more likely that Ozzie doesn't trust that he can replace Poreda and DJ in the pen so he is scratching for the next guy and that just happens to be Torres.

My last scenario is this. What if this is a trade chip? What if someone told Kenny they would make a deal if they got to see Torres throw at the majors? What if Kenny is trying to prove to teams how good he is? I think this might be a stretch, but all of a sudden here, the Sox have another top line pitching prospect that no one knew about yesterday. If Torres is in a deal for Halladay or Haren or another top level starter then I will gladly put tomorrow's game on the line to give him a start, but if this is a reach because we don't want Poreda or Carrasco to start, I think this is the wrong move. Hopefully he just goes out and dominates tomorrow? We are just going to have to wait.