Quote:
Originally Posted by Toro
It's his low key demeanor. Pedroia strikes out and looks pissed, maybe slams the bat and the helmet, the fans go wow he really cares. Drew just calmly walks back to the dugout and gently slides his bat into the rack and takes a seat and the fans think wow this guy doesn't give a ****.
He's also, in some sense, a real victim of how good his swing looks, how "effortless" his swing/fielding looks, and his patience at the plate.
He runs and fields very well, but he never looks like he's running especially hard, even though he (ldo clearly) is. And he gets really good jumps on the ball in the OF, so he's not usually diving around (ala Trot Nixon) in an effort to compensate for bad jumps. Red Sox fans got used to seeing Nixon (who consistently got bad jumps and was really slow) dive around. And Nixon had haaaaaaaaaahhhht, so of course not diving around due to Drew's superior reading ability when the ball comes off the bat and better athleticism creates a perception that he doesn't have haaaahhht, like Nixon. If he did, he'd be diving around. In other words, Drew's a vastly superior RF than Nixon, but Nixon did things in a way that "looked" better to a lot of fans.
And his swing has a nice rhythm and looks "effortless" too. And when he makes contact, the ball usually goes pretty far. I bet he has a pretty high swing/total base ratio (not sure where this stat is tracked, if it is). But he just doesn't swing much, because again, he's got excellent pitch selection. The problem is superficial -- he's so patient that he doesn't swing at much, and we all "learned" in Little League that you swing the bat with two strikes at anything close, blah blah meow chow. But Drew doesn't, he takes a lot of called 3rd strikes, so it creates the perception that he's "lazy" and "doesn't care" because he doesn't flail around swinging at bad pitches.
So Drew is a great contributor, but the aesthetics make it look like he could be doing so much more. And his perception as a guy who doesn't give a **** is reinforced by the fact that he's so patient and takes a lot of pitches, it makes him look like a guy that's too lazy to get the bat off of his shoulders.
Essentially he's the victim of people's bad perceptions about the way baseball is supposed to be played and what kind of things truly lead to wins. Drew does a lot of the latter in a style that makes it look like he's breaking a bunch of fundamental axioms about baseball which aren't valid.
Last edited by DVaut1; 04-20-2009 at 12:53 PM.