I know, I know. It's only been three games, and Red Sox fans need to chill the hell out. We're acting like the season is over, like the Greatest Team in the History of Civilized Sports is packing it up and heading for the gold course. I know. It's unreasonable and irrational behavior.
But let me ask you this: when have you ever, ever known a Red Sox fan to behave reasonably and rationally. Sure, the company men at NESN are telling us that all is well in the same breath they plug Creep Henry's Liverpool footsie team, but all is not well. All is far from fucking well.
While there are many facets of The Greatest Team in the History of Civilized Sports' first three games worthy of my ire, I'm going to concentrate on one, mostly due to the fact that this player's name on the line-up card makes zero sense to me. In fact, this player's name wastes about as much space on a line-up card as said player does in the batting box. The player is Jarrod "I Married My Cougar Gym Teacher" Saltalamacchia---nicknamed Salty, as Chocolate Salty Balls (see video above).
Theo Epstein has had a hard-on for Salty for three or four years now and has constantly referred to him as a big "prospect." But at what point---dare I ask---does a prospect who never produces become a bum? By the end of Sunday's game, when Chocolate Salty Balls came to the plate, I was wishing Doug Mirabelli was back. So I went and looked up Salty's statistics, and let's just say, they're sour.
Since his rookie season in 2007 with Atlanta and Texas, where he put up decent numbers, The Salt-lick hasn't played more than 90 games in a season nor batted above .255. Now I realize .250 is respectable for a strong defensive catcher, but seriously?
In the writing world, we don't have this latitude. No one says: "He has a lot of talent, he's just never written anything good" or "He can really write a great sentence, he just can't put them together in a paragraph."
Or how about the ugly kid who everyone keeps saying is going to someday fill out, turn into a beautiful swam, but never does. At what age do you throw it in and admit it's never going to happen?
Right now, the Red Sox have a giant salt sack of suck behind the plate and only our Captain, fallen cold and dead, in the dugout to replace him. After Texas finished their two-step on the faces of The Greatest Team in the History of Civilized Sports last weekend, the Red Sox are now in dire need of a big series in Cleveland, something to wash away the salty taste of the Snowball The Nation's received via Theo.
Should I start on the starting pitching now? It's too early to be this angry.
2 comments:
To be fair, name four teams in all of baseball with good catchers. You can't. They don't exist. For whatever reason at a young age catchers are told that all they have to do is have a pleasant conversation with their pitchers from time to time, and then just go back to generally sucking. I have no idea why this has happened, but it has. When a player even has a chance of maybe being good, they make sure to stick him in Right Field ASAP, so that the catching position can go back to being filled by a sucky player who's only dream in life is to bat .220, be called "scrappy" by Joe Morgan, and then manage some NL Central team for four years before being fired.
-Brian
Well, The Sox had a good catcher last year, who has been relegated to DH in Detroit. Before V-Mart, I'd call Veritek a good catcher. Posada was a good catcher for almost a decade. Winning teams can generally generate SOME offensive productivity out of their catchers, instead of a sinkhole in the bottom of the line-up. Perhaps, Sox fans have been spoiled for quite some time, which explains my adversion to Salty Stink Sack of Suck.
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