To read Bob Nightengale’s piece in USA Today, it sounds like a bit of a temper tantrum.
The most I can tell: he wasn’t as good last year as he had been the year before. Then they didn’t like that he reacted negatively to the team’s owner talking smack about him in the press and openly shopping him. Then they got really mad at him when he rejected the trade to the Mariners, despite the fact that the Dbacks are the ones that gave him a no-trade clause in the first place. Nowhere in there is it said that Upton’s poor (for him) 2012 might have something to do with the fact that he suffered a thumb injury at the beginning of the season that even the smack-talking owner described as “nagging.”
We never can really know what goes into a team’s assessment of a player. But if the Dbacks’ souring on Upton is really about him having an off year, not liking that he was being publicly denigrated by his team’s owner and then not agreeing to be traded to a place where the Dbacks promised they would not trade him, well, they may need to look in the mirror a little bit and see if the problem was really Justin Upton.
