From Feel Good Story of the Year..........

To The Nightmare on Yawkey Way!

Don't get me wrong Jon Lester's '08 stat line is impressive.

Starts    Innings     Wins     Losses    K's      BB     ERA    Whip

  33         210.3         16           6              152     66      3.21    1.27

He also had 20 quality starts and both of his complete games were shutouts.

So what's not to love?  

Well let's step into my WayBack Machine and travel to the year 2007 (try sounding like Conan O'brien when you read that).  Now that we're here you will notice that his total innings at the end of the '07 season are 165.4 including his major, minor and playoff appearances.  

Now looking back, I mean forward to his '08 combined innings, which total 236.5, even non sabermetric statisticians can see the huge disparity between the two seasons.

30 innings has become the defacto standard for safely upping a young starting pitchers inning from one year to the next.  Lester has over doubled this number with a mammoth increase of 71.1 innings and he doesn't even pitch for Dusty Baker.

Recent (in)famous victims that have fallen prey to larger than 30 inning jumps include Francisco Liriano, Mark Prior and Yovani Gallardo among others.   

Is Lester going to blow out his arm? I hope not, but we will have to wait and see.

Should you draft him?  Definitely, if you trust his arm.  

His ADP has him being taken between the 8th and 9th round and his numbers are worthy of that drafting him there.

And someone will draft him, just not me.  I'll be scooping up later round bargains like Gil Meche and  Javier Vazquez.