The home nine, pt. 6: Left field
What are you going to say about Juan Pierre? Dude hit .365/.392 last year. Overall, left fielders hit .341/.440. So in a season where he hit as he hadn't in years and never, ever will again, he was okay. And in the four years before that he hit .329/.359. A full list of those who hit worse in at least 600 games over that span goes like this: Jason Kendall, Nick Punto, Omar Vizquel and Willy Taveras. The best hope for Sox fans might just be that he gets off to such a bad start that he hits his way out of the majors.
The sad thing is that Pierre isn't even fun to watch. He's so small, with such a 19th century chop-flail-and-run approach, that you'd think he'd at least offer some kind of aesthetic reward. There's nothing. He hits like he's having an asthma attack while swinging a lamp post underwater, and whatever pleasure there is in watching him scamper in the outfield is more than undone by watching his limp throws bounce at the lip of the infield grass and then careen to a dead stop in front of the cutoff man. If there's one guy who's going to cost the Sox a shot at the division, this will be the one.
At least this explains how he ended up on the team.
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Reader Comments (4)
I enjoyed that video.
Paying little attention to the AL in general, I hadn't formalized the notion in my head the White Sox plan to carry Alex Rios, Carlos Quentin, Juan Pierre, Andruw Jones, and Mark Kotsay on their active roster. Trying to predict what kind of production they'll get from their outfield is a adventure. They'll probably win a lot or lose a lot based on the play of their outfielders.
And, as a Braves fan, we've been in that situation for a few years, now. It hasn't worked yet, but then again Mark Kotsay was a starter in Atlanta two seasons ago, whereas he seems to be the fifth or so outfielder on the White Sox depth chart.
"19th century chop-flail-and-run approach"
Are you describing Pierre or Luis Castillo?
Dodger fans loved the guy (as measured by cheers) and regularly wrote into the L.A. times that he should replace Manny Ramirez (after the estrogen thing), so those people found aesthetic reward. He is best appreciated live because TV doesn't do justice to his semi-circular routes to the ball and how far out the cut-off man runs to him. He also has the smallest head of any ballplayer I've seen; two Juan Pierre heads would fit inside one Kevin Mench head.
The outfield listed by Peter reminds me of something I read on/in Baseball Pospectus about Kenny Williams collecting big name busts to good effect in some cases (Jenks, Danks, Floyd) and not others.
I'll get into this a bit more when I do more of a general overview of the Sox but they're just really hard to judge because while some of these moves look utterly absurd on paper, they've also been demonstrably good at garbage-picking. I'm obviously not going to be shocked if Jones hits .160 or something, but I'm also not at all going to be surprised if they manage to squeeze some value out of these guts.
Pierre's head is indeed shockingly small. He's a tiny little dude—I weigh 160 lbs. if I've been eating a lot of peanut butter and I'm convinced I'm larger than he is.