But What of Juan Pierre?
By Neal Pollack
As the season’s endlessly pathetic first half winds down, Dodger fans are still clinging to hope, but that word probably needs to be reserved for fans who realistically have some. This team isn’t going anywhere. All true Dodger fans (as opposed to the 80 percent of the people who attend the games, who think that Nomar is still an All-Star and beach balls are awesome) have admitted that to some degree or other. Therefore, I think it’s time to take stock of how and why 2008 has gone into the shitter, and by “take stock,” I mean, “bash Juan Pierre.”
I’ve never seen a worse positional player at the big-league level than Juan Pierre. Yes, I know that he leads all major-leaguers in career stolen bases, but for a guy with great speed, he sure tends to get into a lot of rundowns, and is no guarantee to score from first on a gapper double. He stops and starts at precisely the wrong times, and at least once this year, I’ve seen him steal second only to get tagged out after oversliding. He may be, in Charlie Steiner-speak, “one of the toughest hitters in the league to strike out,” but he’s pretty much the easiest player to fool into a shallow pop fly to center field. Because of his speed, he sometimes catches balls, but you can practically see opposing baserunners twirling their parasols as they stroll home from second on a bloop single, or tag up and score on a lazy fly ball to left field. No one should be able to score on anything but a warning-track fly to left, but Pierre’s noodle arm is incapable of getting a baseball from the outfield to the infield at human speed.
Yet even though Juan Pierre has single-handedly raised my triglycerides to stroke level over the last two seasons, I can’t really blame him. He plays his game how he does – crappily – and anyone who watches baseball, particularly anyone who watches baseball for a living, should be able to see the crappiness before his eyes, and evaluate accordingly. Here is where the Dodgers, almost psychotically, falter.
From the general manager to the hitting coach, on up into the broadcast booth and then back down to Frank McCourt’s field box behind home plate, the entire Dodger organization appears to be incapable of evaluating big-league talent. This may seem incongruous, given the fact that the Dodgers have been bringing up some great prospects the last three seasons. From all reports Logan White, the team’s director of scouting, knows what he’s doing. But when it comes to putting players in the Blue, the team is pure befuddlement.
It’s the Domino Effect, as in “getting your ass handed to you by an elderly Jamaican man who’s been winning at dominoes since the 1940s.” An unscrupulous agent rooks general-manager Ned Colletti, who then signs Juan Pierre to a five-year, $45 million contract. Pierre then proceeds, almost single-handedly, to drive the Dodgers’ 2007 season into the ground, abetted by simpleton manager Grady Little’s unwillingness to bench him, or at least bat him eighth.
This season, our Savior Joe Torre took over for Little, who is now wandering lost around Georgia golf courses in his soiled underwear. Things were looking up for a while. Pierre didn’t start Opening Day, and it appeared that, at last, our team was in the hands of a Brilliant Baseball Mind™. But Juan Pierre clearly has voodoo hex powers over anyone who might block his baseball progress. Not only did Andruw Jones, the man Colletti hired to replace Pierre at a rate of 18 million dollars a year, turn in the most pathetic two months of baseball hitting in anyone’s memory, a streak so bad that he retreated to the disabled list in shame, but then Rafael Furcal, the team’s best hitter and only reliable leadoff man, took a Monday off with a sore back and hasn’t returned since. When Furcal went down, the team was 18-14. Since then, Pierre has started every game, and played nearly every inning. As of this writing, the team is 14-24 with him at the top of the order.
For sure, the shortstops hired to replace Furcal have been a blooper reel of hitting incompetence, and Matt Kemp has been flailing at the plate like an old lady swatting flies, but you still have to lay it at Pierre’s feet. Yet all you hear about from the broadcasters, or at least from Steiner-Monday Windbag Radio Central, is that “Pierre is enjoying a very solid season,” or that he does “all the little things.” Yes, the little things that will fuck up your team but good, like popping out on the first pitch with the bases loaded.
Another canard, spread mostly by Steiner, is that Pierre is “the leading hitter in the National League with runners in scoring position.” For a while this was, technically, true, though unlike someone like Ryan Howard, Pierre rarely comes up with runners in scoring position, given that the people batting before him are usually Angel Berroa and Mark Sweeney. As I listened to the game today, won by the Dodgers over the Reds in typically anemic fashion, Steiner amended that to “the third leading hitter in the National League with runners in scoring position.” Those numbers are dropping fast, because numbers always do unless the hitter in question is Chipper Jones. By August, we’ll be hearing how Juan Pierre is in the “top 20 hitters in the National League with runners in scoring position,” and then, by September, that stat too will disappear.
Juan Pierre is no more a great clutch hitter than I am a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. Of course, if the Dodgers were in charge of the Pulitzer committee, I’d probably be getting million-dollar book advances. They just seem to have very little idea who does what for them, and how much those players are worth. No wonder Juan Pierre is always the first person in the batting cage every day, swinging away cheerily. If I’d fooled everyone into thinking I was good, I’d be smiling all the time, too.
Published: 06/25/2008
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