Not Fully Closed Out

The Sox yesterday officially declined their $7.5 million team option on Keith Foulke yesterday. That's not a huge shocker. After a year and a half of injury and ineffectiveness, there's no way in hell that Foulke could be considered worth that. So now Keith has 48 hours to decide if he thinks he can get more than $3.75 million on the open market. If he doesn't think that, he can exercise his player option and return to the Sox for one more year at that rate. That's probably the smart bet at this point. One wrinkle with that is that Keith Foulke never really seemed to enjoy pitching for the Sox that much. Even after pitching brilliantly in the 2004 postseason, it didn't take him more than 15 minutes to start bitching that he should have been the MVP over Manny. I happen to agree with him, but let's enjoy the moment for a while first, shall we?

At any rate, especially given Mike Timlin's $2.8 million contract, there's still an outside shot that Keith Foulke could believe he's worth at least $4 million and could get that (he might be right) from a quieter-market team where he doesn't have ten thousand Angry Bill types screaming about him on talk radio.

If he stays, though, there's the question of how to use him. Theo made some statements yesterday or today about how the Sox are very much in the market for a "closer," whether by free agency or a trade. Theo hinted that they had some internal options as well, which is true, but is also gotta be largely blowing smoke. It's not going to be Timlin. It's not going to be Delcarmen or Hansen. Well, it might be, but those aren't really good options. I'd argue at this point that their best internal option might be...Keith Foulke.

Clearly, when healthy, the guy can be an elite closer. When his fastball is around 87-88 mph and his change is at 78-81 mph, he's really really effective. I know it's an incredibly small sample size, but just look at his September appearances. 11 appearances, 11.1 innings, 10 hits, 9 strikeouts, 1 walk, a WHIP right around 1.0. That's a closer-type line. I don't know if these were high-leverage innings or not (actually, by September, the Sox didn't have any high-leverage innings), but he seemed in that brief time, to have recaptured some of his vintage form. Is that the real Keith returned to save us, or is that a blip on the overall downward spiral? I wouldn't mind paying to find that out.