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Post by thelavarnwayguy on Feb 18, 2015 22:58:34 GMT -5
He may come back in time but I doubt it's with the Redsox. I'm not convinced the Sox are all that great when it comes to drafting head cases / guys with substance abuse issues. I think the record is not all that great in that instance. Some of the guys we haven't heard much about in that regard look and act like partiers to me. Eventually they do appear to be the ones getting moved though. It's a major problem for every team probably but they pay people a whole lot of money to scout these guys and that is a part of scouting IMO.
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Post by ramireja on Feb 19, 2015 0:41:30 GMT -5
He may come back in time but I doubt it's with the Redsox. I'm not convinced the Sox are all that great when it comes to drafting head cases / guys with substance abuse issues. I think the record is not all that great in that instance. Some of the guys we haven't heard much about in that regard look and act like partiers to me. Eventually they do appear to be the ones getting moved though. It's a major problem for every team probably but they pay people a whole lot of money to scout these guys and that is a part of scouting IMO. I don't know man, that doesn't seem like a fair statement. Keep in mind we've been drafting ~30 players a year in the past couple of drafts....you're not going to hit every nail on the head. I've heard nothing but praise for the makeup of prospects and recent prospects like Swihart, Betts, Bogaerts, Owens, Vazquez, etc...and thats just the successful ones. Guys down the ladder like Ball, Dubon, Asuaje, Chavis get a lot of praise for their makeup too. I'm sure every organization has a couple of loose screws in their system. Have you kept track of the Rays prospects recently?
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Feb 19, 2015 14:07:49 GMT -5
He may come back in time but I doubt it's with the Redsox. I'm not convinced the Sox are all that great when it comes to drafting head cases / guys with substance abuse issues. I think the record is not all that great in that instance. Some of the guys we haven't heard much about in that regard look and act like partiers to me. Eventually they do appear to be the ones getting moved though. It's a major problem for every team probably but they pay people a whole lot of money to scout these guys and that is a part of scouting IMO. I don't know man, that doesn't seem like a fair statement. Keep in mind we've been drafting ~30 players a year in the past couple of drafts....you're not going to hit every nail on the head. I've heard nothing but praise for the makeup of prospects and recent prospects like Swihart, Betts, Bogaerts, Owens, Vazquez, etc...and thats just the successful ones. Guys down the ladder like Ball, Dubon, Asuaje, Chavis get a lot of praise for their makeup too. I'm sure every organization has a couple of loose screws in their system. Have you kept track of the Rays prospects recently? One thing that needs to be addressed here is that good baseball makeup does not equate to being a good person in general. There's a million examples of guys who were or are unintelligent, reckless, arrogant, abusive (including violently), addicts and just all-around jerks who had great baseball makeup. Manny Ramirez was barely a functional person outside of baseball but he never let a bad AB or a slump get in his head. Say what you will about Bonds or Clemens, but nobody worked harder at baseball than those guys. Ted Williams literally wrote the book on hitting, and he was a guy who flipped off fans and had pretty awful relationships with most of his family. Not only do personality traits that are generally considered negative often not matter in terms of baseball makeup, in some cases they're actually helpful. How often do we hear a player praised for having a "short memory"? It's important that a hitter doesn't let a bad AB get to him, or that a pitcher doesn't start hesitating to throw strikes after he's taken deep. Off the field however, that can equate into a person who doesn't learn from their mistakes. Extremely violent sports (ok, football specifically) demonstrate this problem clearly. Conversely, we've seen the makeup of Bogaerts widely praised. He's so good with interviews, he speaks four languages, etc. We've all heard these things about him a million times. And then I look at that awful slump he went into last year and I wonder a little bit. For all the good things you can say about him as a person, none of it really matters to his baseball career if he's the type of guy who can't deal with an 0-for-15 streak the way Manny Ramirez could. Denny is an example of a guy who's personal shortcomings are way over the line and who's career is probably over as a result. However, there are a lot of guys who have similar problems but still have very good baseball makeup and can keep whatever off the field issues they have in check enough to avoid what's happened to Denny. Being a good person doesn't necessarily have anything to do with being a good baseball player and it's possible that in some ways the two can actually be opposed. So despite the occasional bust like Kukuk or Denny, I can't really fault the organization for take a chance on those guys.
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Post by brianthetaoist on Feb 19, 2015 15:08:34 GMT -5
All of that's very true ... just the extreme competitiveness necessary for any professional athlete is a trait generally counter-productive to being a good guy in other walks of life. However, I think it's harder to hide in baseball than other sports. There's too much downtime where the players are hanging around each other, and the media access is more pervasive than in most other sports. And at the minor league level, you're just too unprotected from the fans and general world. I think there are AAU high school basketball players that live more protected lives than minor league baseball players.
I think that makes a case like Denney's harder for a team to deal with. It's not so much that he got suspended for being a jerk (Mike Lansing got to the major leagues, after all, and that dude was an a-hole), but that his extreme immaturity and lack of professionalism just made his eventual success unlikely enough that the team didn't feel it was worth dealing with him on the baseball diamond until and unless he showed signs of growing up.
None of this means that you need to be a decent person to be successful in baseball or even popular in baseball (Manny Ramirez being a good counter example there), but the variations from the norm are on a narrower band than in a sport like football, I think. Some level of maturity (or, in a case like Manny's, at least enough of a monomaniacal focus on baseball) is probably a bigger factor in success in baseball than other sports. Football, you can be a truly despicable human in almost all ways with an incredibly destructive lifestyle, and few will even know until you're arrested by the cops for murder.
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