Like any other successful venture, a good baseball team must be assembled with a certain tolerance for risk. One of the reasons the Los Angeles Dodgers are off to a good start is that they were willing to take a risk that Derek Lowe, one of the worst pitchers in the majors last year, would benefit disproportionately from pitching his home games in a park that suppresses the kind of infield hits a sinkerball is prone to giving up.

Their gamble looks to have paid off for now – Lowe has posted a 2.04 ERA and averaged over seven innings per game in his first five starts. Likewise, the Mets took a risk on Pedro Martinez, who might have been thought after last year to be finished as an elite starter, and have been rewarded as Martinez has proved that nothing of the sort is true.

The Boston Red Sox, of course, were unwilling to take the kinds of risks on Lowe and Martinez that the Dodgers and Mets did this winter, with good reason. Pitchers are inherently dodgy bets, and rather than sink a lot of money into one of them, the Sox brass decided to spread the cash around.

With the money that could have gone to Martinez, the Sox were able to sign Matt Clement and David Wells, two fine starters with track records of success and durability, and Wade Miller, a very good starter whom the Astros cut loose over the winter due to concerns that he would miss at least a month – and possibly the whole season – due to an injury.

In addition to these three, the Sox had returning ace Curt Schilling, the underrated Bronson Arroyo, and veteran knuckleballer Tim Wakefield, as well as cheap fallback starter John Halama. The theory was sound: In a best-case scenario, Schilling and Miller would be ready to pitch by May 1, giving the Sox six quality starters and a choice between putting Wakefield or Arroyo in the bullpen – the sort of problem any team would like to have. In the worst case, with Schilling and Miller facing setbacks, the team would still have a reasonable rotation.

Now, the Red Sox find themselves in an even worse bind than most pessimists could have predicted. Schilling, having apparently rushed back to the rotation too soon, has not fully healed his ankle, and a report by Baseball Prospectus’s Will Carroll has the injury worsening to the point where it is “threatening the integrity of his bone.” Wells also has a severe ankle/foot injury of some sort (the Red Sox have been evasive about specifics). In the worst case, both pitchers could miss most or all of the season.

For now, Halama will take Wells’s spot in the rotation, while dubious options like former Mets scrub Jeremi Gonzalez and Abe Alvarez, a 22-year-old whose first name and left-handedness suggest he will be referred to as “crafty” very soon, await a call up from Triple-A.

This, of course, exposes a hole in the Red Sox’s seemingly sensible policy of risk aversion – their rotation was built around two exceptionally durable but old and fat pitchers, one of whom was known to have a fairly serious injury.

Still, the Sox are well positioned to take advantage of Yankees’ woes caused largely by a pitcher-acquisition strategy with all the downsides of the Boston approach and few of the benefits.

The Sox are, after all, not the only team in the AL East with an absurdly inflated payroll and problems with pitcher health. While the prospect of Abe Alvarez might seem a delicious one to Yankees partisans seeking bright spots in a season that’s seen their nightmares about the state of their rotation come true, it’s worth noting that he’s the Sox’ eighth starter. Miller should take the mound for the Sox within the next month, joining Clement, Arroyo, Wakefield, and Halama in a rotation that would rank among the best in the league. That’s the advantage of depth.

The Yankees, on the other hand, have the Alvarez-equivalent, Chien Ming Wang, who will be taking Jaret Wright’s starts while he’s out with a shoulder injury. Should Kevin Brown have another one of his seemingly inevitable breakdowns, the Yanks will probably have to call up Colter Bean, whose gaudy minor-league strikeout totals mask a fastball that would make Jamie Moyer laugh. That’s a big step down from having Wakefield and Halama at the back of your rotation.

None of this is to say that the Sox are in particularly good shape right now. As a few other mistakes they’ve made in recent years have done, the injuries to Schilling and Wells have exposed the team’s weakness for theories that don’t really fit their personnel – droning on about minimizing your downside exposure is ridiculous when the combined age of your top two starters is exceeded only slightly by the combined width of their waistbands. But as circumstances have it, the Yankees spent the winter making even dumber decisions.

We all knew the AL East would be a race – who knew it would be a race to the bottom?