Krause: It used to be ‘wait til next year,’ now it’s ‘nope, not this year’

It is surely a good sign when we can go from “wait ’til next year” to “nope, not this year.”Such a sentiment is surely a much more mature, responsible and overall healthy way of addressing the chances of the Boston Red Sox of repeating as champions of any variety in 2008.Nope. Not this year.We’re all going to be going to bed a little earlier this fall. The duck trucks won’t be needed. Boston Mayor Tom Menino won’t have to worry about scheduling a rolling rally on the same day as the presidential elections, the way he prematurely planned the Patriots parade (the one actually held by the New York Giants) so conflict with Super Tuesday.None of this logistical planning is going to happen, because the Red Sox bullpen cannot get anyone out. And a leaky bullpen is among the hardest things in baseball to fix.Need another bat? Go out and pick one up when one of the bad teams (and there are enough of them) holds a fire sale. Are you a starter short? Someone will dangle a starter in front of your nose, and he can be had ? for the right price, of course.But bullpens are tricky. Last year, the Sox thought they’d made the steal of the trading deadline when they got Greg Gagne from the Texas Rangers for a couple of prospects. Then, Gagne morphed into a gasoline can, and by the end of the season, the only games he was pitching were the ones in which the Sox were either hopeless behind or ridiculously ahead.If you have a bad bullpen in April, you’re going to have a bad bullpen in July and August. Relief pitching is a state of mind as much as it is anything else. Either you embrace the pressure of closing out a close game (the way Mike Timlin – one of the true warriors this team has employed – did in his prime) or you shrink away from it.Last year Hideki Okajima was unhittable. He got on a role early, helped by an unlikely save in April against theYankees, and sustained it almost until the end of the season (though if you were paying attention, hitters had pretty much figured him out by the end).Point is, his confidence was sky high and he pitched with that as an advantage. Every pitch went where it was supposed to go, with the proper amount of stuff, because every pitch was thrown confidently. There was no holding anything back.This year, there is. Okajima has no confidence in what he’s throwing up there, and it’s getting hammered. Manny Delcarmon is a great pitcher when the score’s 7-0 either way. He throws like he’s Don Drysdale. But when the game’s on the line, he throws like Calvin Schirladi.For better or worse, these are the two pitchers the Sox rely on most when they try to build that bridge to get from the starter to Jonathan Papelbon (himself a little less intimidating this year than last). And they’re failing miserably. Add a scatter-armed Craig Hansen and the maddeningly wild Javier Lopez to the mix and you have one of the more combustible bullpens the Sox have had in quite some time.You can’t blame the bullpen for everything, but this year’s Red Sox had better be mashing opponents into the ground, because they’re not going to win close games.And worse, we saw this past weekend in Anaheim, how manager Terry Francona has no confidence in that bullpen. He left Josh Beckett in there in the eighth inning Saturday to get beat on a pinch-hit triple rather than take him for a relief pitcher. Would he have been as reluctant to take him out last year?And Sunday, we saw why he has such little faith in Delcarmon. He took Tim Wakefield out of a game in which he’d pitched well and brought in Delcarmon, who immediately gave up a two-run double to blow another game.I don’t see these problems being solved by a deadline busting trade, and I don’t see them solved by throwing a rookie (Justin Masterson) into the breach either. You don’t send a kid down to the minors for three weeks and then bring him up as a late-game stopper. Developing a reliever with the proper combination of spine and stuff takes a little longer than that.It says a lot that the mos