Quote:
Originally Posted by DJ's left nut
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.
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He's been deemed an underachiever due to how great his rookie season was. He was pretty much hyped to be what Trout became. He'll never be what Trout is. But he's still a really good player assuming he never reaches what people thought his potential was(which I think it's looking more likely than not that he won't reach said potential).
A large reason why people haven't embraced Holliday is because he dropped a ball off his nuts in a playoff game vs the Dodgers and still hold that against him to this day even though he's been really ****ing good in St. Louis. And you're right, he doesn't have that defining "Cardinal Moment". Neither does Heyward, but we'll see how he performs in October.
I don't think he's worth $20 mil. +, but at the same time, what other options do the Cardinals have? They'll just have to address an OF solution once Holliday is gone, so why not extend Heyward to prevent that from happening? There are worse things the Cardinals can invest $20 mil./year than Heyward.