The media barely cares about the Red Sox. Shaughnessy is the only general columnist that pays them any attention.
Or what happens when one is a football team and one is a baseball team, especially a football team that was the greatest dynasty in NFL history for about 20 years. You think if they'd kept Betts and still won 25 games last year people would have cared more?
Absolutely.
Also the Pats were 7-9 last year (third in the AFC East) and looks like they're settling in for a similar season. So as sad is it is to say, that dynasty is over. The Sox had a real good opportunity to grab the sports conscious of New England back and they more than kinda blew it for the reasons SJH mentioned above.
Check out the New England Revolution if you want to watch an exciting and dare-i-say dominant team?
They're having a great season and yet have been criminally undercovered by the media. Such a shame.
I've been following the headlines. Every time I look, they seem to be winning.
You might be right. But here's a good comparison, after 1967 until 1975, the Red Sox weren't great. They were always pretty-good to really good, but they were never great. From what I understand (I wasn't born yet) tehthing that kept the Sox in the Boston sports zeitgeist was Carl Yastrzemski. I don't have to tell you this, but even though the Sox weren't winning pennants, he was still performing at an excellent level. He was the reason why people tuned into the Sox. He WAS the Sox for all those years. You could say the same thing for Nomar and Pedro prior to 2003.
Except Yaz wasn't a pending free agent likely to leave for the highest bidder in 1970. I get the sentiment you're going for with this analogy, but the financial landscape of the game was entirely different in 1969 compared to 2020. To the point where your comparison doesn't hold a lot of water. Times have changed and we can't view 2021 athletes through the lens of how they were treated and/or behaved 50+ years ago.
Mookie wouldn't be here this year anyways. Wasn't his contract up after 2020?
Disagree. Yaz may not have been a free agent, but he wanted to get paid. If the Sox didn't want to or couldn't afford to pay him, they'd trade him. Baseball is littered with players who were dealt because their clubs felt that they couldn't afford their stars. The Philadelphia A's did it twice, the Red Sox have done it.
Except Yaz's only leverage would have been to hold out, which means the Sox don't pay him and no one else does either. So I still don't think the situations are comparable.
Shank already has Chaim in his crosshairs. I'm sure the column is already written.
Mookie was clearly the best all-around athlete the general Boston area teams have seen in decades but never had a stretch where it seemed he was carrying the team to a victory all upon his own shoulders. Without even going into Brady's Super Bowl heroics... Ortiz's playoff heroics... both of them are seen as the main figure in bringing the first championships to Boston (for ever for the Pats... and almost forever for the Sox). I don't think ANY sports figure will be able to capture that again unless the championship victories go dormant for a looong time.
Forget about the heroics. He wasn’t seen as THE FACE of the organization the same way as Papi, Brady, etc.
Not sure I agree here. He really had a great personality on the field. Who do you think was during Mookie's time if not him? Papi was still here for the first 3 seasons but it was clearly handed off to him. He was a superstar. But just not to their level, nor could he ever become that.
This somehow misses the dozens and dozens who have rejected the Sox due to Mookie!
Yes he was a star, yes he was the most prominent player, but there is another level of popularity / superstardom in Boston that Mookie never achieved. He never got to that Papi, Brady, Bird type level where he was universally adored by the fandom. I liked him well enough and enjoyed his tenure and production, but I never felt that same type of emotional attachment. I may be in the minority on this one but I am guessing there are a lot of Sox fans out there with a similar viewpoint.
Trading Mookie in 2020 was much more analogous to trading Fred Lynn in January 1981. Yaz was a god, but Lynn was the player almost every kid in little league wanted to be. He made the spectacular plays and looked like he was having fun doing it. The team from 75 - 80 had firepower so you can't say Lynn was the reason attendance and interest in the team popped (even more so than the post Impossible Dream years) but there was something undeniable about Lynn as a magnetic attraction for that team. I think the 10-12 year olds whose fandom came of age in 2018 and saw their idol traded will feel the same way 30 years from now as many of us do about the Lynn trade. @Chad Finn should probably write the book on it. The only thing muted the ire for trading Lynn was that they screwed up Fisk's contract offer and 3 weeks later Fisk was a free agent ultimately signing with the White Sox. Attendance peaked at 2.35 million in '79 and dropped to just under 2 million in 1980, but cratered to 1.060M after trading Lynn, Burleson, Hobson and losing Fisk.
I hope the person who has the gun to your head that's making you read this thread gets tired soon. Thoughts and prayers to you during this most stressful time.
You're right, Fred Lynn might be a better analogy.
Yes. I call him GAMBLOR!
One player doesn;t drive local loyalty. But if Ohtani's pitching, I might stay up late to watch an Angels game on MLBN that I otherwise wouldn't give a shit about.
They always do. Other than that guy who said the NE Football coach was an asshole.
He wasn't here long enough to be allowed to become a sports God because unlike those other players the ownership decided they didn't want to pay him to stick around.
Mookie has a 4.5 WAR this year. Verdugo has 2.4 WAR. Of course the team would be doing better if they flipped the two players.
Okay. So you don't take him at his word. I do. Do we both win? Or Lose? I forget how this turns out.
Did you miss the tidbit in the article that noted that cable subscriptions have nosedived? A higher percentage of a much lower number means fewer eyeballs on the team.
Mookie's WAR seems to always be inflated by his defense. For 30+M less I'm fine with Verdugo.
That is not the case this year: Mookie has a 3.8 offensive WAR and 0.4 defensive WAR. (Given the way B-ref calculates WAR I'm unsure where the missing 0.3 WAR comes from, but the 4.5 is def their overall number for him). This is a change from some of his previous years.
Just means that to me that I think they just about always say that and it doesn't necessarily mean it's true. I think Mookie is a very smart man who says the right thing just about all the time because you never know what's down the line.
Totally fair. But unlikely you would if he’s just batting and not pitching. Maybe Bonds and McGwire did this but few others.
Mookie has a lower OPS than JD, whom everyone seems to hate, and he’s missed like 30 games. If he were doing that for the Sox for $32M, I’m sure there’d be a lot of complaints.
This is true. My sense is that SJH's point would be that 50M is couch cushion money to Henry, and if he gave a shit, he'd spend it on great baseball players.
Mookie has a higher OPS+ than JD (132 vs 127) despite the lower OPS because he's doing it in a much harder stadium for hitters. It's logical to think that if he were playing half his games in Fenway like JD his OPS would be higher. And of course Mookie plays stellar defense while JD does a mean impersonation of a hat stand in the rare moments he's allowed to play in the field.
And honestly I don't know what JWH gives a shit about now. He used to appear to care that the team won and won a lot, and spent a lot to do so. With Liverpool and Roush Fenway Racing and the development around Fenway going on, I honestly don't know where his primary focus is these days. Getting some insight from him would be quite the get from our intrepid sports media.
This is always the point that is glossed over by this who can't let go of Mookie. People think the bottom third of the roster is a patchwork quilt now; imagine it with $50M less to spend
Wasn't he saying "I would have been happy to stay in Boston if they had given me 12 years, $420,000,000"? I don't think his sentiment about staying in Boston is particularly meaningful when it's tied directly to that contract demand. Mookie also said that he wanted to max out his earnings. There's no reason to think that he wouldn't have left for a better offer even if he hadn't been traded. As he said, “I don’t care if you’re working at Waffle House or for the Red Sox or for the Dodgers,” he told Schube. “You should just get paid what you’re worth.” I realize that this is an intractable issue for certain posters, but I don't understand why we should weight his "I want to stay in Boston" statements more heavily than his (completely correct and rational) desire to earn as much money as he possibly could.
He played 6 1/3 seasons, roughly. I'd say that Brady and Papi were both gods in New England after 6 seasons (2000-2005 for Brady; 2003-2008 for Papi).
