Quote:
Originally Posted by Rams Fan
Look at his batting stat line avg. for his career compared to this season. He's pretty much been in line with everything. The only things that might be slightly below avg. are his HRs and his OBP. He is still a fine player, he just will never be the 30 HR player people thought he could be after his rookie year.
And to PGM, who do you replace Heyward with then? Heyward/Holliday/Piscotty/Moss>Holliday/Piscotty/Moss/Pham
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And his reputation, largely deserved, has been that of an underachiever.
When a guy's stats are in line with the stats that got him a fairly negative label during his young career, I think it's fair to say that he's been a disappointment. At this point he's simply disappointed a
new set of fans instead of continuing to disappoint Braves fans.
And when his contract demands start getting tossed about, that disappointment will turn to anger if he's making $20+ million/season to be a complementary offensive player and corner OFer. Neither of those roles are valuable enough to justify premium $$.
I had this discussion YEARS ago with BRC when he argued that Cards fans would never turn on AP because they'd stuck beside him during his slumps. I pointed out that AP had never made market and when he was making beyond it, Cards fans would jump him quickly. Now we never got a chance to truly test that theory, but the "I'm glad he's gone, we couldn't have afforded him and X,Y,Z" fan is the majority position now. If he were still HERE soaking up 1/4 of our payroll the last 2 years and failing, disappointment would have given way to anger.
It'll happen with Heyward as well. PGM made the proper analogue when he talked about Holliday - a large swath of Cards fans have never embraced Holliday because he was expensive and doesn't have a "Cardinal Moment". It'll happen with Heyward as well, and he'll have an even less noticable impact than Holliday did.