I was watching “Yankees Hot Stove” on the YES Network today (I think it was a repeat from sometime this week) and the topic of the suprising continuing free agency of certain players came up. One of the panelists, George King, the Yankee beat writer from the New York Post a Yankee beat writer from one of the New York papers (I forget his name, but it wasn’t Jack Curry of the New York Times, who was also on the panel) spoke about Bobby Abreu. He expressed how shocked he was that a player of Abreu’s caliber could not get a job and finished his comments by saying (I am paraphrasing): “I’d rather have Abreu than Manny Ramirez.”
This statement was not qualified by any mention of the relative costs of the two players, so I am pretty sure that he meant, if he could choose either player, regardless of cost, that he would rather have Abreu on his team than Manny Ramirez. Both are horrible defenders, so the comparison should be based purely on the offensive value of the two players. And, as I Love Nerd York City noted in a recent post, Ramirez absolutely destroyed the ball in 2008, which was apparently also the season in which he gave up on his teammates and cemented his “bad teammate” reputation. Specifically, Ramirez posted a 1.031 OPS in 2008, as compared to Abreu’s respectable, but unspectacular, .842.
This is just another example of Ramirez’s “bad teammate” label making the mainstream sports media forget that they are talking about one of the greatest hitters of all time. And these are the people who vote for the Hall of Fame and MVP awards. No wonder they so often get it wrong (Jim Rice, Tim Raines, and the frightening number of votes for Jack Morris, to name a few).
(4.75 out of 5)