At the start of the season, you might remember
this hilariously fawning exchange between Hawk Harrelson and Darrin Jackson:
Hawk: Here's a guy that's hitting .163 as he stands up to the dish, and I am just so happy he's here.
DJ: I tell ya, you would never know by watching his actions that he's not hitting .363.
Hawk: He's gonna be, barring injury, a tremendous asset to this ballclub.
Almost five months to the date later, Jackson issued probably the most open criticism of Darin Erstad's limitations from the broadcast booth all year. During his first at-bat in
tonight's loss to the Royals, Jackson said:
Well, Darin, without question, is not the hitter that we have known from the past years of success. He has swung at a lot of pitches tailing off the outside corner and been unable to catch up to 'em, as you saw right there, helping the pitcher out on the breaking ball.
The discussion was then cut short as Erstad shot a foul ball into the Sox dugout. It's improbable that it would've continued anyway.
Erstad ended up drawing the collar tonight, although he did drive in a run by beating out a potential inning-ending 4-6-3 double-play ball by half a step. This performance came on the heels of
an 0-for-5 night during which he was the only Sox starter without a hit and made two of the three outs in the 11-run fifth inning.
To say it hasn't been a good year for Erstad would be an understatement. Since returning from the DL at the end of July, he's posted a line of .221/.302/.310 over 113 at-bats. What's worse is that it's not that far off from his season line of .247/.307/.329, the worst of his career. It's even challenging his injury-plagued 40 games from 2006 in terms of OPS+.
Compounding the pain of watching Erstad struggle to the finish line is watching Ross Gload, the guy Erstad replaced on the roster, doing Ross Gload things in the same game. He drove in the first run of the game with a double off the tip of Jermaine Dye's outstretched glove, and added two walks on top of it. On top of the offense, he made a couple nice picks around first base. After tonight, his line is .298/.322/.459, playing half his games in a park far unfriendlier to left-handed hitters in terms of power numbers.
Basically, this situation became the sum of all my fears, going back to
what I wrote when Gload was traded to Kansas City for Andrew Sisco:
At the same time, the Sox still have only one and a half outfielders,
and there are no indications that the situation will be improved before
the sport starts up again in February. I'm concerned that either the
Sox will have to suffer through Podsednik once again, or make a wrong
move in trying to replace [Gload] when a solution was in the organization
all along.
...and following it up with what I wrote about
the Erstad signing one month later:
There is some to like about this signing -- it fills some holes on the
depth chart and it's only a one-year deal. On the other hand, it also
makes for a lot of frightening prospects, and Scott Podsednik's injury
(which warrants a separate entry, next) opens another door for Erstad
to display his plucky, tenacious, intransigent, balls-to-the-wall
mediocrity.
While admittedly a big Gload fan, I'm not going to get carried away and say that Gload's absence explains the 20-win decline from 2006 to 2007. However, is it fair to say that this series of moves submarined any chances Kenny Williams had of improving the team? It didn't save the team any money, and not only did it cost production from an already troubled spot in the lineup, but when considering Sisco's "accomplishments" this year, it led to the Sox flushing two roster spots at the start of the year.
Williams wasn't entirely wrong to take a flier on Erstad. Take his defense, baserunning, apparently better health and extra motivation, there was a good chance of getting a
dead cat bounce. The problem was that he didn't look at Erstad as an experiment, but rather a one- or two-year commitment -- all while he had a better guy worth more playing time rotting on the bench.
Of course, Williams still would've had to find center field insurance unless you would've rather banked on improvement from Brian Anderson (I wouldn't have), but I imagine it's a lot easier to make one move than two.