Monday, April 16, 2012

Bobby Valentine Is An Idiot, Part I

What I hope will be a great tradition here at ABR, I'm starting a new segment called "Bobby Valentine Is An Idiot."  This is where Foment or I take something that Bobby V either says or does and present it as evidence that he is, in fact, an idiot.

Today's example: calling out Kevin Youkilis

Specifically for not being "as physically or emotionally into the game."

First, lets assume that by "the game" he means "baseball".  I know he's an idiot, but surely he isn't thinking that Youk is going out there trying and emotionally playing table tennis or something stupid like that, or physically going out there in a hockey mask or something.

Second, this is coming after a slow start to the season (2-20, 0 BB, 1 2B), but after a very good 3 game set against the Rays (4-10, 3 BB), where he missed the 4th game.  So really, it seems unwarranted from a statistical standpoint, even with the usual small sample size caveat.

Third, again like in the CC Sabathia article below, his BABIP strikes me as an abnormality.  Career, he's a 328 BABIP hitter, right now its at 261, which will probably come up as soon as he gets healthy.

Fourth, he's been having groin problems, so calling him out to the media by saying that he isn't "physically...into the game." is like kicking him when he's down.  He can't walk up to the batter's box and magically be healed.  Plus, he's a bit older so he'll take a little longer to heal.

Fifth, and most importantly, Kevin Youkilis has been a big player on the Red Sox for years.  His career OBP in 8-ish seasons for the Sox is 390 (in 919 games), and his OPS+ career is 127.  That's second on the team since he became a regular in 2006, not counting Gonzalez's numbers in Petco.  He's played any position that has been asked of him, and played them well (dWAR career of 4.7 playing a lot of games at multiple positions seems pretty good to me).  This is just a bad move by Valentine, and he's been managing them for about a week.  I hope it comes back to bite him in his seat.

In closing, I now have a new favorite non-Cardinal player in Dustin Pedroia for calling out Bobby V's BS with this little quip about how it could be used to motivate Youk (whose only motivation is to get healthy right now):

"[M]aybe that works in Japan."

I salute you DP.  Feel free to come here and blog with us sometime.  Even though Foment's a Yankee fan, he's a pretty nice guy.

1 comment:

  1. I will be completely up front, Youkilis is probably my least favorite player in the league, but when he does go out to play ball, he goes out and gives it everything he's got. Hell, Adam Jones credits the lack of Youk as the primary reason the Os were able to upset the Red Sox last year.

    Also, apparently Bobby V has already offered Youk an apology

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