Wednesday 30 July 2008

Cue the Eeyore Chorus

As reported by Jordan Bastian among many others, Scott Rolen confesses he's having issues with his surgically repaired shoulder. This, of course, provokes the doom and gloom crowd to come to the for with proclamations about how they knew he was washed up all along and that this is what we get for making an ill-advised trade and so on and so forth... in other words the folks who had remarkably little to say about the Rolen trade a month ago when Rolen was among the best hitters on the team.

Rolen assures us the shoulder has been checked out and there is no lack of strength, no pending surgery, no damage...just that "something mechanical isn't right". But because of one horrible month (of the sort most all players routinely have on occasion) many of the nihilistic Jays fans are back on the ledge again.

Now, is it POSSIBLE that we are looking at a guy who's career has been short-circuited and he'll never be productive over a full season again?

Absolutely.

Do we KNOW that?

Hell no.

So why are so many professed fans so very very anxious to ASSUME the worst possible case?

It's just as possible that a little rest and rehab will put him right back where he was in June. As I have observed elsewhere, the folks who were certain that Rolen would suck had nothing at all to say on June 1 when Glaus had all of 2 HR in St. Louis (including Bob MacLeod who was only too quick to cite Glaus' stats for no apparent reason in his report on Rolen's issues) and still nothing to say when Rolen was outperforming Glaus through June 30. . . now they are out in full voice.

And they wonder why I have so much trouble taking them seriously.

~WillRain

2 comments:

Navin Vaswani (@eyebleaf) said...

i love scotty rolen. i've professed my love for him on many occasions on my blog. he's a joy to watch over at third. by no means am i calling him a bust who can never get his shit together again. but based on right here and right now, st. louis won this trade, no?

Drew said...

No. Glaus is streaky, and just completed a hot streak. As Will said (and I wrote at the time) as of June 30th this trade was an offensive wash. There was a difference of 15 OPS points at the end of June. Rolen had a bad month, Glaus had a good one. After a couple days off, the reverse could happen in August. I still think both teams got what they needed out of this trade.