Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Anatomy of the Red Sox batting order - WEEI | Rob Bradford
(www.weei.com)
Interesting stuff.
Read More...John Farrell and Torey Lovullo looked down toward the Twins bullpen. They saw some stirring, as Minnesota lefty reliever Brian Duensing had grabbed a ball and tossed it a few times.
Then Duensing sat down. It was then the Red Sox manager and his bench coach knew they had put the right people in the right places.
“It’s a good feeling,” Lovullo said after the Red Sox’ 12-5 win over the Twins Saturday night, “when all the puzzle pieces fit perfectly.”
The puzzle Lovullo ...
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1 2 >Philly I get. Does this mean he's hated by Boston? Really?
Anyone who calls himself a Red Sox fan and hates JD Drew forfeits any right to call his team the 2007 champions. Just pretend the 2007 world series was supposed to be between Cleveland and Colorado, but it was so cold the games were postponed. And since nobody cared, the games were never rescheduled, and there is no 2007 champion. Got that in your head? OK. Now you can go on hating JD Drew.
I would guess L.A. is the other.
The article says Boston. I think that's wrong.
from the article:
" Despite putting up OPS+ of 105, 138, 134 and 109 in his first four seasons in Boston, the Fenway Faithful inaptly labeled him as “soft.” The nickname “Nancy Drew” became the standard. Somehow, even though Drew was one of the more patient hitters on the team during his tenure, he became known as the guy who would leave the bat on his shoulders in clutch situations.
To recap: Red Sox fans hated J.D. Drew because they thought he was a bad baseball player."
Pretty much every sentence there is completely wrong or at least a huge exaggeration.
And no mention of Drew getting no backlash for 2011.
Huh. It never occurred to me they hated him. I just assumed they were indifferent to him.
I like Drew well enough but he wasn't exactly a guy easy to embrace and love as a fan.
Butch Hobson
Black Ink: Murphy 31, Drew 0
Grey Ink: Murphy 147, Drew 11
The above is still relevant to HoF voters. And the WAR similarity is all about their defensive metrics, which very few HoF voters would fully endorse.
Thanks.
He plays the game like there's no tomorrow. But there is a tomorrow.
I had no problem with J.D. He played OK in Boston, but the big grand slam made up for a lot of ills (and that first season he was dealing with his kid's illness). He wasn't a great signing, but considering the number of terrible FA deals Theo and co. handed out, his was just fine in comparsion.
Overall, Drew was better. In Boston, Christopher Trotman was.
I think this is true, but a little overstated. Although more popular than Drew, Nixon was never as much a fan favorite as Nomar and Varitek in the first half of his career, or as Ortiz and Damon in the second half (or Pedro the whole time).
For the record, Nixon had the (slightly) higher OPS+ in their Boston stints.
Drew in 2004 was one of the most impressive all-around seasons I've ever seen from a Braves' player, excepting only Chipper's immortal 1999 campaign. Shame it had to cost Adam Wainwright.
When Drew signed with Boston, Rosenthal criticized the move, in large part because of the way Boston would react to Drew. I remembered emailing Rosenthal and saying that Drew might actually be a perfect fit for Boston. Dan Shaugnessey can't annoy you if you don't read a newspaper. The talk radio guys can't get on your nerves if you never listen. Drew was just a guy who showed up to the park, did his job, then went home. He wasn't engaged or involved.
(Rosenthal responded generously with a, "Fair point, but I don't agree" message. He was very, very good about responding to emails)
I think Nixon is pretty darned close to that. Remember, this is a guy in 2000 that a lot of people didn't want to trade for Sammy Sosa who was in the middle of a string of 50-60 home run seasons. I think Trot is probably as popular as any recent player.
Wow, maybe we need a "Trot Nixon And Perception" article because I really don't think that's even close to being true.
Not sure I understand the point of the article. Is it a mystery why Murphy and Drew are perceived differently? They were very different players. Murphy had an 8-year stretch where he averaged 5 WAR, and that included a strike-shortened season. Drew's best 8-year stretch was 31 WAR with no strikes. That's a fairly big difference, and shorter time periods would tend to benefit Murphy too. Sure, Murphy had more bad seasons--five seasons at the end of his career in which he accumulated 1 WAR--but the writer's conclusion that this makes Murphy less consistent than Drew is incorrect. Murphy was consistently great for the heart of his career and consistently bad at the end. Drew was consistently good with one or two great seasons sprinkled in.
In addition, Murphy played practically every day for over a decade (and in fact had four consecutive seasons where he did not miss a game), while Drew never played more than 146 games and often played far less than that. From 2000-2010, Drew averaged 124 games per season. If he had averaged 150 games during that time period, he'd have finished his career with 51 WAR, and if he had averaged 160, he'd have finished with 54 WAR, and in both cases he'd probably be getting some HOF support.
On top of that, Murphy is supposedly a great guy, religious and charitable, while Drew started off his career on the wrong foot by holding out and re-entering the draft. I mean, is it supposed to be a mystery why Philly fans dislike him?
A more interesting comparison would be Murphy vs. Larry Walker. Walker was legitimately better, was recognized as a great player during his career, but is getting similar levels of HOF support to Murphy.
I fit in the middle here. There wasn't hero-worship but Trot was respected as a "ballplayer" where Drew wasn't.
-> injured all the time
-> poor defensive fielder
-> didn't hustle
-> not clutch
-> way overpaid.
i'm not defending them at all, and disagree with the above. but that's some perception...
Also, as to the Drew hate, I'm surprised to hear people don't think he was disliked in Boston. Red-Sox fan primates, am I the only one who remembers non-stat fans constantly complaining about this guy? That's how I remember it. They didn't like his personality and his lack of RBIs proved that he was useless.
You are not. He was definitely thought of as an overpaid disappointment. Not emotional enough, didn't care. Etc.
I *think* we like to think that most Sox fans finally came around to saying 'maybe I was too hard on him', and those that hang on to the hate are just extremists. But I dunno..
Again, that's just one game, but it was my defining memory of the thing. Well, that and the Blue Jays scored a run by running the AL East-winning play from "Major League."
As it should be. Maybe Murphy is overrated and maybe Drew is underrated, but I have a hard time constructing a HOF case for someone who wasn't able to stay in the lineup enough to appear on the leaderboards more than a handful of times.
This may be true. I feel like the hatred is largely mitigated by the grand slam. I will add that that grand slam is on a very short list of moments that I've experienced at Fenway. The explosion of sound and joy is rivaled by less than a handful of other moments (1990 strikeout of Frank Thomas in the last game of the season, Ortiz' Game Four and Five walk offs...that's about it off the top of my head).
I think a lot of animus for Drew in Boston was driven by personality. The criticism of his actual play flowed from that, as the set of fans who just plain didn't like his reserved demeanor extrapolated a lot of things, e.g. patience at the plate became "too passive", graceful running style became "not hustling", not throwing a tantrum after a bad at-bat became "doesn't care", and so on.
Even as someone who thought he was a very good player and was glad to have him on my team (he had such a pretty swing, and I particularly loved watching him play defense - so smooth!), I have to say I found him a difficult player to "like" because his public persona was awfully bland. Nothing wrong with that, of course; I doubt a team comprised of 25 Pedroiae would get along very well.
I guess "not liked" is a pretty accurate summation of a lot of Red Sox fans' feelings towards Drew. Which, it should be noted, is not the same as "disliked".
At least, I think that line was just for him. I never heard them say that line about anyone else.
L.A. fans hate Drew not because he opted out, but because he publicly stated he would not opt out. There was a huge feature in the L.A. Times about how much Drew's wife loved living in Pasadena, blahblahblah. A month later he was gone.
From Colletti at the time: "In light of what J.D. said at the end of the year, about making a commitment and how much he loved playing here, I was surprised. J.D.'s a man of his word. I guess he changed his word. I think you expect things to be handled in a certain way. Based on what was written at the end of the season, you have to ask yourself, 'How did this happen?'"
And this from the L.A. Times:
During the season, Drew said he and his wife had discovered that they enjoyed Southern California. Drew repeated throughout the year that he did not plan to exercise the opt-out clause, telling Times columnist T.J. Simers in August, "I just want to give you some fun for the next few years."
In the final week of the regular season, he reiterated he would remain with the Dodgers. "At some point, you make your commitments and you stick to them," he told the Orange County Register.
I don't get this either. In Arizona may fans feel that Justin Upton is a terrible outfielder because he's bad at things they can clearly see (bobbles, errors) and their eyes can't perceive the difference his speed makes and the range it provides him, more than enough extra balls caught to offset the errors several times over.
But JD Drew seemed like a competent outfielder, smooth, at worst decent if not good, and if you found out he was really rated highly by defensive systems you shouldn't be very surprised.
Some neanderthal looking dude near us glared at me and I quickly decided it was time to find our seats.
Drew was not liked by a lot of Red Sox fans. I wouldn't say "hated" with any sense of generality. And the dislike happened this way:
2006-07 offseason: Agrees to a $14m/yr contract. Signing is held up because the physical suggested he wasn't healthy. After months pass, he is signed to a $14m/yr contract anyway. That gave the initial perception that he would not be worth his contract.
2007, through early October: Didn't play well. When he did play, he displayed an indifferent demeanor. That doesn't mean he was indifferent, but combine his performance and the "overpay" contract with the demeanor and it's a perfect storm of crap.
October 20, 2007: The reset button was hit.* To straightaway center.
2008: Injured. Repeat.
2009-10: Good hitter when healthy, but getting worse in the field, partly because he wasn't healthy.
2011: Slow, injured, and hitless is no way to go through life, son.
JD Drew was a great player overall, and he was a good player in Boston. But with a lot of fans he got off on the wrong foot and never really set things right. The issues he had with his son (age 3, major health problems, having to be in a full body cast for an extended time, or something like that) were likely a huge distraction, and certainly understandable - but they were not widely known at the time by the fans. What they did "know" - or to fit in with TFA, perceive - was that he was likely to underperform the contract, which he appeared to do from day one.
* I cannot overstate this. Yes, one home run in a blowout was enough to negate a lost season. The 2006-09 Red Sox were often squandering their scoring opportunities in an immensely frustrating fashion. Then, in an elimination game at home, they load the bases with none out in the first inning, and promptly give up 2 outs without scoring a run. It had the feeling of the mother of all squanders.
JD Drew was a good fielder in his career, and in Boston he did a lot of things right. But injuries (and age?) affected his range with the Red Sox.
The funny thing is that people notice that less than any other aspect of defense (see Jeter, Derek, Gold Gloves and). Drew always LOOKED like a good defender and I don't remember ever thinking he was particularly noteworthy in his lack of range. On top of that he had a strong and accurate arm. I would be surprised if a large number of casual fans felt like he was a poor defender.
I think he had a couple of strikes against him right out of the gate. I think following Trot was a problem and as a player with the exact opposite personality of Trot that didn't endear him to people and the perception that he was always hurt preceded him. That of course was not helped by the Napoli-like delay in his signing.
What's funny though is that Drew had a bunch of major clutch moments in the post-season. Besides the Grand slam he also had the walk off hit in the big game five comeback against Tampa in the 2008 ALCS and a monster 9th inning homer to break a tie in Anaheim in the ALDS that year. Despite that I think the general consensus is that the grand slam was the only big hit he had.
This was fed not-so-subtly by La Russa.
I guess it's a sign of the dilution of post-season memories that Drew's 8th inning homer off Schilling in Game 5 of the 2001 NLDS is almost completely forgotten.
I'm disappointed the simulated fans don't throw virtual batteries.
"What do you think of Shane Victorino? Better than JD Drew, or just as bad?...Are the Red Sox throwing lots of money at mediocre players?"
I'm pretty sure I read the second sentence right here at BBTF ... without the question mark.
Reality: Drew was in the majors for 14 years without ever playing 150 games or gathering 525 at bats in a season. Drew only had 500ab once in his 14 year career.
I'm not Drew's psychologist, but I'm suggesting a connection.
I'd gladly take Drew on my Strat-a-matic team because his 2/3 of a season is projected out to 162 games. In the real world? There's a ton of better ways to spend $14 million of a organizational budget.
How did Drew ever become big enough to even matter much to the fans? He wasn't brought in to be the star, he wasn't brought in to turn a franchise around, he wasn't even the biggest signing of that offseason. He was brought in to be a good player for 130 games a year. Even if they flop those guys don't usually generate much passion in the fanbase.
He was also actually fragile, instead of fake fragile. By that I mean that he was not like Bob Horner, whose response to injury problems seems to have been to put on weight and not work hard, for fear of injury if he did work hard. Drew was not like that. He stayed in the best shape he could. He wasn't willing to take fence-crashing risks, because those risks were higher for him that for a sturdier person, but he was not a malingerer, and didn't deserve much of his bad press. I tend to compare him to a now-obscure player named Geronimo Pena, a second baseman for the Cards in the 1990s. Pena had boatloads of talent, but simply couldn't stay in the lineup. He had one year where he lived up to the expectations generated by my projection systems at the time; that year was 1992, when he only played 62 games, but did play those games at an All-Star level. Pena never dodged a workout or gave less than whatever his body had at the time, but he vastly underperformed what his minor league numbers predicted. Drew was better than that, brighter than that. When healthy at all, he played at a Hall of Fame level, but then there are those other seasons. What there is not is a bunch of bad half-seasons with one or two good half-seasons thrown in there. That is, Drew worked at staying as healthy as possible because he knew what his play meant to his employer, and he was trying to honor his contracts. I think that this is very bright, and a credit to Drew, not a fault.
In short, I don't think it's appropriate to boo Drew. My take is that J. D. realized that if he took chances out there, he'd wind up with Pena's career, instead of the one he did have. This is wisdom, linked to the idea that baseball was his job. Fans just don't like to see that in their players, but in the case of injury-prone guys, conservatism on defense is often the difference between a good season and a bad half-year. - Brock Hanke
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