Saturday, March 10, 2012

Rod Barajas Blows

Haas, Moss?  (see post below)

3 comments:

  1. Well, you guys either are intentionally pissing me off, haven't looked at the blog in a few days, or truly don't remember, but fortunately someone does! Courtesy of Phillies Nation "Guys We Despise" post: (coming in at #9)

    -Ole! That’s how Rod Barajas’ career will be remembered in red pinstripes. He was supposed to bring a powerful bat to the back-end of the Phillies lineup in 2007. Instead, he was an abject failure here, and like Freddy Garcia, just kind of slid into the background.

    With the Phillies, Barajas played a career-low 48 games and hit just four homers while knocking in 10 runs in 147 plate appearances. But it will always come back to that one play that he failed to make.

    Against the Florida Marlins, Barajas somehow missed an easy tag on Hanley Ramirez, who was a dead duck at home plate. The missed tag allowed the game to continue and two pitches later, Brett Myers threw his arm out, leaving the game with a strained shoulder.

    Not only did Barajas not do much with the bat while he was a Phillie, he had a hand in one of the crappiest plays of the last decade. On top of that, he managed to kill the Phillies every time he faced them for a good three years. As our own Jon Nisula puts it, “look at his career stats against the Phillies once he left: .971 OPS against the Phillies compared to his career .698 OPS, 27 PA/HR in his career, but just 11 PA/HR against the Phillies. How does that happen?”

    Put all that together and it gets you to #9 on our list.

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  2. Ok, fine, I'll bite. I don't hate Rod Barajas. I nothing Rod Barajas. I really couldn't care less about the guy, and I'm not sure why he's so much more deserving of your hatred than other players that have underperformed for the Phillies. What about Wes Helms? Do you hate him?

    They brought Barajas in for one season to be a backup catcher, a role in which he sucked. I thought it was a good signing at the time, but obviously it crashed and burned. He didn't play well here, but clearly it didn't matter, since we came back and finally won a division title in 2007. The guy who closed out the final regular-season game? Brett Myers. So it didn't even really matter that Barajas cause him to hurt his arm.

    Could part of the reason for his suckitude be that the only other season of his entire career in which he played fewer than half his team's games was as a rookie with Arizona in 2001? It's entirely possible, and that wouldn't really be his fault. Either way, Rod Barajas is an imperceptible, near-nonexistent blip on the radar of Phillies history (even recent Phillies history), and he's not worth losing sleep over.

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  3. Also, to be fair, he never batted better than .256 and his career average was .238. If you were looking for him to hit .270, you were misguided.

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