Is Rich over the Hill?

I think there's a better chance of the Red Sox releasing Moncada than Hill being in the rotation next year even if he throws a 12 inning perfect game in his last start.

They can hopefully keep him here at least in the bullpen. He won't be expensive so the injury risk wouldn't matter too much, and it would give us another backup starter in case of injury.

Does he qualify as a low mileage arm?

Let's get real. Hill has been in the majors for 11 years, and he has all of 500 innings under his belt. He's gone over 100 innings once, over 50 just three times. The 23 he's put in with the Sox this time around ranks fifth in that list, right below the 23.2 he put up in his rookie year.

His stuff is very good, it always has been. I'd like to see the team make him an offer. But in no way should he be promised a starting pitching spot. His track record is one of endless disappointment. Maybe he's past all that, but you'd be crazy as a GM to bet on it.

Hill or Wright as the #5 instead of Miley, Owens or Kelly? Seems completely unreasonable.

Is Hill going to give the Sox 200 innings? Clearly, no. Could he be the bridge to Buchholz not picking up a baseball until mid-May (thereby MAYBE being useful for a stretch run)? Perhaps. I agree with soxcentral. $1.5 mil with incentives is a pretty cheap risk.

certainly over the hill, I think the hill is generally early 30's? I do think he has a couple more years before you say his career is over. i imagine next year if they are in the ALCS and its game 3 or 4, I am confident about starting this guy. that curve is amazing!

Just replacing Breslow with Hill, this team is better on two fronts. A long reliever you won't be nervous about when asked to throw a spot start. Odds are that Hill would be serviceable for more IP than Breslow has been. Possible too that Hill could have a mentor type relationship with the other young LHSP's. I think 75 IP from Hill is reasonable. Anything over 100 IP and either Hill is en fuego or Sox are in the playoffs, or both.

He deserves a band wagon. Is it possible that, having always been a good pitcher, that after 500 innings and years of extreme trial and error, he has figured something out at age 35?

If he were ERod, Owens, Johnson coming up from AAA and pitching like this, there would be talk of a Cy Young. IMO his history of success in the Majors makes these
three amazing performances more predictive than if he
were a rookie. There is something here worthy of keeping on the team.

But the walks? 4.2/9 career, 5.0 in 2012 which you cite as him being "outstanding." He's been under 3 a couple of times and those were good years, but the control he's shown in these three starts is very different from the rest of his career.
That said, I'm all for trying to keep him, though the risk of injury seems gradysizemoresque.

There's something folks are missing that makes the odds of this Rich Hill being really, truly better than any previous version of Rich Hill immensely more likely.

He has never thrown the ball like this before. It's an entire new arm slot, pretty much midway between his pre-injury overhand delivery and his post-injury sidearm one. And of course, there was a ton of room between those. 

Go to FanGraphs and find the very recent article about him, and find my comment, which gives the pitch/fx release point data. I'd do it myself if I weren't doing this from my roommate's laptop (and no, Macs are not intuiyivelu obvious to use if you've spent your life on a PC, and I think I'll leave that typo in as evidence of my wrestling with this keyboard!), after mine died Tuesday night (which is why I've disappeared. New desktop arrives Monday). 

Again: he has always had great stuff, but his shaky control and arm problems turned him into a mediocrity. So far, with the new delivery, he's had extraordinary command and control. He's obviously not going to have that kind of command every start, but this is clearly how good he can be, and he should still be nicely effective on a day when he isn't at his best.

And had my laptop not died, I would have urged signing him to a new contract before this last start, because his price was likely to go up. Which it did. They might think about a nice one-year guarantee plus a bigger team option for the season after, and maybe a vesting option for games or IP. Whatever it takes. 

With his age and history, yes, there's a much bigger question about quantity than quality. But as someone pointed out, he's a great guy to have on a staff that has Clay Buchholz as it's #2. And adding Hill to the SP depth chart makes up for the fact that we won't be able to include Brian Johnson on it with any confidence, even if he is prescribed rest rather than surgery.

The biggest issue with his 2010-2014 is the small sample and 6 of the 8 IBB came against RHB, which would make sense since he was a LH relief pitcher primarily being used to get LHBs out.

(over that 5 year stretch he threw a total of 75.2 innings - really amazing how few innings he has thrown at the MLB level)

Even taking off the 0.9 IBB he is still at 5 un-intentional walks per 9IP (with a higher walk rate vs lefties that righties). What he's doing now is very very different. I hope he can continue to repeat the delivery with that new arm slot.

Maybe be careful, I did the same with JBJ breaking out, and that "future 800 ops" milk is turning a tiny bit sour for me