As baseball fans, we tend to react first, and think later. If at all. The Red Sox trade of Marco Scutaro to the Rockies, announced on Friday, is a case in point. Within moments of the announcement, Facebook, twitter, and that dark murky place otherwise known as ‘the comments section of all sports media sites’ were awash with a tide of negative commenting that made the tide at Omaha beach look virgin pure.
‘This is a horrible trade!’ we screamed as a fan base.
The knee jerk reaction was full of bravado and hyperbole. Within ten minutes of reading the collected masses opinion, it was abundantly clear that; Cherrington is in over his head. The Sox are panicking. The Sox don’t know what they are doing and so forth.
People get so angry, so riled up, don’t they? The Internet may be a valuable source of information, however it seems to encourage people to, well, to say really stupid, angry things.
On calmer reflection it looks as if the Red Sox know exactly what they are doing. Scutaro, much as many of us Sox fans love him, is 36 and earning a relatively large slice of change, $6 million approximately per season. He is a nice guy, a good clubhouse presence and a decent bat. He is not the second coming of Ozzie Smith nor is he the second incarnation of Hanley Ramirez.
The Sox saw an opportunity to use any of a number of in-house options at short (Iglesias\Avilez\Punto) while putting the $6 million saved towards bidding on the services of one Roy Oswalt.
So first things first, if you are perhaps still angry at the trade, would you trade Marco Scutaro for Roy Oswalt?
Look, here’s the thing. The Red Sox front office are doing due diligence. They spend hours upon hours, days, breaking down all possible moves, with all the best information at their fingertips. With all due respect, ‘Bob’ in Framingham, commenting angrily on the ESPN website, probably isn’t the absolute best judge of whether the Scutaro trade is for the best of the Boston Red Sox or not.
To quote the great Keith Foulke, Johnny from Burger King may feel like it is important that he (or indeed she) rains down a carpet bombing campaign of negative feedback on this trade, but at the end of the day the only people who have actually put the hours in to researching and analyzing all possible permutations involved are the Red Sox front office.
Now I say this to myself as much as anyone else, because at first glimpse I wasn’t wildly enamored with the idea of the trade, but maybe people should sit back and think about the reasoning behind a big trade or other move before plonking themselves down in front of the keyboard and banging out a poorly written, scrambled, angry reaction.
Maybe think for two seconds.
There is generally a method to the madness.
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