Joel Sherman’s latest column is about the fury and backlash among Mets fans in the wake of Fred Wilpon’s comments about the team and its best players. And he has some decent observations about how, if you’re a Mets player, you’re not likely to be all that motivated at the moment.
But there was one passage in there that really has me scratching my head. In it, he’s talking about how Jose Reyes and Carlos Beltran are best served to look out for number one right now (you know; that thing they’ve been criticized for allegedly doing for years already) because the team obviously doesn’t care about them. The passage:
I’d be curious to hear who Sherman heard this from. Because really, I find it shocking that baseball people actually say things like “hey, get greedy in RBI situations.” Why? Because baseball people realize that baseball is not basketball, and one does not defer to teammates in scoring situations in the interests of either strategy or team chemistry.
While bunting or situational hitting to get a runner into scoring position in the first place is understandable, if there is already a runner on second or third base (i.e. Sherman’s “RBI situations”) the hitter is always going to be “greedy” to drive him in. Indeed, I’d like to meet the player who would avoid doing such a thing and, rather, pass the RBI opportunity on to their teammate further down the order. He’s probably a player who is suffering from some sort of mental deficit. Or at least an overdeveloped sense of purity:
“Hey, Beltran: be an RBI whore!” said Mr. Collins.
“No, I shant attempt to drive in this run. For I, good sir, am an RBI gentleman,” Mr. Beltran replied.
But whatever, if Sherman says someone told that Beltran, someone must have told that to Beltran. And either way, the concept of the “RBI whore” has now been introduced into the baseball lexicon, and if you think for a moment that I won’t beat that baby into the ground in the morning recaps, well, you’re just not too familiar with my work.