May 24, 2010

Phil Watch: Ichiro Is Overrated Because Casey Kotchman is Bad


I don't know why I continue to fixate on such an inconsequential writer.

But here's another nugget.

Phil was asked to name the "Most Overrated" hitter in baseball for the Four Corners segment, a infinitely dippy feature from four guys in the Tribune family.

The other three players listed by other writers were Carl Crawford (wha?), Jose Reyes and J.D. Drew.

Phil offers...Ichiro.

Single out Ichiro

What's the definition of "most overrated?" You could look at it just in terms of hitting ability, but in my opinion major league baseball is always about the money, so l'm going to consider it in relation to a hitter's value to a team. That makes this an easy question, as Ichiro Suzuki -- who you can argue is the best pure hitter in the game -- is clearly the most overrated.

Yes...clearly. He's been paid $87.5 million by the Mariners before this season since 2002. And he's had a total WAR value of $141.3 million. JHC! So if you have a great player on a bad team, it's mostly the great player's fault they're bad? That's F'in NONSENSE!

What do his 200-plus hits every season -- heavily loaded with singles -- do for the Mariners? He had a majors-high 225 in 2009 and they scored the fewest runs in the AL.

It gets you Phil calling Ichiro an MVP candidate in July of 2009.

He's again leading the majors with 58 hits (including 48 singles), and Seattle is 14-26. Singles hitters, even those with speed, need to be in deep lineups to realize their value.

Pussy slap-hitter. Take your .352 average and .362 wOBA and go home. You're the problem with the Mariners. Not the .195 average from Figgins and GM Z thinking Jose Lopez, Casey Kotchman and Milton Bradley will be reliable sticks in the middle of the order. He took a high risk-reward shot on a lot of guys and it's flamed out so far. But yes, the leadoff hitter getting on at a .395 clip is the problem. And the fact that GM Z didn't create a deep lineup after Ichiro is clearly Ichiro's fault.

The drop in power numbers in recent years makes the guys who do regularly drive the ball to walls, and over walls, as valuable as they've ever been. A singles hitter in a bad lineup is a hood ornament on a beater. These days, that's Ichiro.

Holy Mother Of Crap! Somebody please make sense of that for me. Ichiro is a superlative singles hitter that gets on base four out of every ten times in front of guys whose job it is to drive him in. Ichiro does his job, the Casey Kotchmans of the world don't and that's Ichiro's fault?

Using Phil's logic, if you buy a beautiful piece of steak and cook it wrong, it's somehow the cow's fault.

A freaking great singles hitter is the most beautiful hood ornament you ever saw. Just because someone decided to put it on a beater doesn't take anything away from its inherent beauty. You just wonder why they put it on a Gremlin that is the rest of the Mariners' lineup.

Ichiro is overrated because he's not Albert Pujols. How dare he not be something he's not.

Easily the frontrunner for the dumbest thing Phil has written this year.

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