Theo Epstein opened up his wallet once again this weekend, adding yet another medical cadaver to the fray in Takashi Saito.

I’m joking here because I do like the signing, it’s another bit of inexpensive bird shot to load into Terry Francona’s bullpen shotgun.  Saito will be in a low pressure situation in 2009; the Red Sox are not counting on him to be the 9th-inning juggernaut he was in Los Angeles.  The Sox have enough reliable arms in the pen to begin the season, and they have the ability to be conservative with Saito’s workload out of the gate.

It’s probably best that we don’t get our hopes up too high for Saito, as there were grumblings that his right arm was “hanging by a thread” at the end of the 2008 season.  Regarding his elbow, Theo Epstein had this to say (among other things) via conference call on Saturday per WEEI.com:

“Clearly he had the elbow issue last year. He worked hard and came back in September and threw fairly well in September and he’s been throwing out to about 150 feet with good results. No pain whatsoever. The most significant step for us with regards to his health was the extensive physical we put him through in the last couple of days. He did really well on the physical examination. No sign of pain whatsoever. Our guys put him through a number of tests and he did well. The contract is built to sort of mitigate risk on both sides and we think there’s significant upside to Takashi and we can’t wait to see what our pen looks like if he’s in the middle of it.”

The best case scenario is a healthy Takashi Saito baffling AL hitters as he did in the NL for the past three years, supplementing the most dominant bullpen in baseball.  He would then become a surrogate for fellow righty Justin Masterson, who could be gradually converted into a starter.  The worst case scenario is he becomes a two million dollar hiccup: prolonged absences with periodical appearances in which he gets shelled, followed by his retirement.  Not a pretty situation, but not one which would cause too much damage to a team already heavily invested in bullpen arms.

A good over/under mark for Saito’s innings total would be around 40.  I’ll take the over.

Prediction: 52 innings, 53/24 K/BB, 3.07 ERA.

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