In Boston, it’s never enough to lose and never enough to cut ties with a player who isn’t playing very well. Losing has to come with drama and departed players have to be kicked by anonymous sources as not just bad players, but bad people as they leave town. It’s just uncanny.
The latest is Rob Bradford’s piece, sourced by someone inside the Red Sox, that says A.J. Pierzynski was not just an ineffective hitter who wasn’t helping the team, he was a bad, selfish seed. He “had become such a negative influence on the team that players approached both the Sox coaches and front office to address the problem,” Bradford says. He goes on:
A microcosm of Pierzynski’s approach was mentioned by more than one of the backstop’s former teammates, who revealed his propensity to spend a significant amount of time looking at his phone while at his locker during games. In one instance, after a particularly rough outing in which the starting pitcher had been pulled early in the game, Pierzynski could be found staring at his phone while the pitcher gave off the appearance of being an emotional wreck just a few feet away. That incident paved the way to at least one complaint to management from a teammate.
Such a shocker here. I mean, it’d be one thing if Pierzynski had a nearly two-decade track record of being a low OBP guy with some pop, some fairly “meh” catching abilities and a prickly personality, but … oh, wait.
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I just don’t understand why this always happens with the Red Sox. Every other team in baseball manages to cut players when necessary and not have it be a big deal. In Boston, there are always knives out when people walk out the door. How the story of him being DFA’d isn’t “Pierzynski wasn’t cutting it, we aren’t winning, we have this young catcher named Vazquez who we think can really be the future of the club and we want to get him up now” is beyond me.
