We are doing our best to shake the bye week blues here at the mailbag.
The bye week is rough, of course, because it’s really two weeks. Fourteen days between games. And it’s been nearly a month since the Patriots have played in a game that felt like it meant something. That’ll change on Sunday when the Dolphins roll into Gillette, a game that I suspect will be the main focus of the mailbag next week.
But this week’s edition has something for everyone. We break down the for the Red Sox, bring back the old “Did Manny quit in 2006?” debate (with special guest star Alex Speier), ponder the Hall of Fame chances of Jorge Posada, drive cross-country with Dick Enberg, learn the lessons of life from Serena Williams, blast Rajon Rondo and test the “60-and-under” rule.
To the 'bag we go (and, as always, feel free to e-mail away to kminihane@weei.com)
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Minihane,
Trot [Nixon] was a great overall player with average hitting and good defense, but J.D. [Drew] should be on there. If you're going to pencil in a fresh lineup, nobody is hurt, etc., you have to put J.D. in before Trot just for the offensive numbers he can produce over him.
Jim
A: Lot of similarities between the two guys, Jim. High OBP, pretty good power, have had trouble staying on the field. It’s true that Drew’s numbers with the Sox (.276 batting average, .390 OBP, .485 slugging) are better than Nixon’s (.278/.366/.478). I just don’t think the edge is substantial enough to make up for the 457 extra games played by Nixon. If Drew had played five or six seasons for the Sox and put up the same numbers he’d be on there. But I just don’t think three years is enough.
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Kirk,
Good column. About the all-decade team, I’d put J.D. Drew in there over Trot Nixon. And I agree with you about Bill Mueller. I think people have already forgotten about him, which is too bad because I don’t think they win in 2004 without him.
Josh
Chelmsford
A: Where has this J.D. Drew cult been the last three years? Maybe Alex Speier’s TREEmendous piece from a few weeks back about the value of Drew opened some eyes (no kidding — I think that column was the best work done by anyone in the 15-month history of WEEI.com. Well, that and my fantasy opus ranking the tight ends in 2008, perhaps better known by its title: “Shockey Amadeus.”) I guess Theo’s “J.D. Drew is Better Than You Think” tour didn’t hurt, either. But again, I’ll take 90 percent of Drew’s value in 457 more games. That’s Nixon.
You don’t have to sell me on Mueller. I think he was an easy pick over Mike Lowell at third on the all-decade team. Maybe I’d think differently if Lowell had an extra 457 games, but one extra season doesn’t make up for the 28-point edge in OBP and 24-point lead in slugging for Mueller.
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Kirk,
Let me be the first to offer a puzzled e-mail ... Manny in '06 as the No. 2 season by a Sox this decade? That’s a tough one given that he quit on the team and was labeled by guys in the Sox clubhouse as “the biggest disappointment” of the season.
It’s funny — a couple weeks before he quit in that Yankees series, I was saying that he was having the better season than [David] Ortiz and was having perhaps the best year of his Sox career (considering that he was playing every day until he quit). But by the end, not a chance.
Also worth mentioning: Since you are into fangraphs (I think), his $14.4 million value that year (for a team that finished out of the playoffs) was the second-lowest of his Sox career. It’s one thing to cite the '02 season as the best by a Sox hitter of the decade, since a broken finger is a legitimate injury ... The '06 season is a tough one to view as exceptional, at least to my mind.
Cheers,
Alex Speier
A: Yup,
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