It hurts me to say this…
June 27, 2009 5 Comments
I was feeling a little like Eric Seidman today and decided I would check out the FanGraphs leaderboards for something interesting. I’ll get this out of the way now–the word “interesting” depends on who is reading.
I looked at the hitters who had the greatest percentage of fastballs thrown to them, minimum 120 plate appearances. Scanning the list, it’s clear that a distinct type of hitter is found on it. While these guys aren’t terrible, let’s just say you wouldn’t be building a team around them any time soon (unless Dusty Baker is building the team, in which case the lineup would likely not be your only problem).
A little ways down the list, you can find one Ken Griffey Junior, the proud distributor of over 600 baseballs into the seats of various stadiums. He has hit home runs off of 399 different pitchers in 43 different parks and now pitchers are pitching to him like he’s Scott Podsednik. Yeesh.
It hurts me to watch. Sad that such a great player returned to the Mariners just a shell of his former self. I assume this is probably the end of the road for The Kid.
If he wasn’t a legend, I would be calling for his benching at this point. The Mariners and I both have far too much respect for the man to watch him sit on the pine.
However, if the M’s continue to be in the race, I have no doubt he will be “needing more rest” then ever before.
“I was feeling a little like Eric Seidman today…”
Seidman, if you’re reading this, you’ve officially become a household term.
You’ve all been Eric’d
I’m embarrassed to say that I stumbled across this by googling my name while being bored at work. Gave me a laugh, haha, poor Griffey.