The Real Kevin Youkilis Is Missing
October 11th, 2009 | by Darryl Johnston |
Not sure were he went.
No one is sure where his bat, his defense or his head went but Kevin Youkilis was reportedly in uniform for the Red Sox in this year’s ALDS. He was just so bad that it started making people wonder where the hell he went.
Youkilis scratched out one double in 12 ABs en route to a .083 BA. Throw in his mental miscues in Game 3 over at first base and you have reason to wonder what was going on. How can Youkilis play so poorly?
Try looking around him.
David Ortiz – Awful .083 BA
Jason Bay – Terrible .125 BA
Dustin Pedroia – Bad .167 BA
Victor Martinez – Bad .182 BA
The only decent performance from a non-pitcher came from Jacoby Ellsbury. Youkilis was just glaringly off in this series and with that the rest of the offense stunk as well.
Queue up the big-bat offseason speculation.
Darryl Johnston is the Red Sox correspondent for Fanball.com. He has many years of sports writing under his championship belts. Email him – redsoxdj@gmail.com
Tags: 2009 ALDS, Boston Red Sox, Darryl Johnston, David Ortiz, Dustin Pedroia, Fanball, Jacoby Ellsbury, Jason Bay, Kevin Youkilis, Sox Tea Party, Victor Martinez
By GEORGE on Oct 13, 2009
DJ,
Did you see Over The Monster’s comment about this? Dude said you didn’t know anything. I’m not sure what he is talking about though. He said Youkilis saved runs when he didn’t scoop Bucholtz’ throw over. I think he is trying to say that letting the runner advance to 2nd and then throwing wildly to second is saving runs.
Also, when are you doing the AL/NL debate on here? Make sure you involve me.
_GEORGE
By Darryl Johnston on Oct 13, 2009
I read the comment. I don’t know what he is talking about either. I don’t think we are talking about the same thing. What I saw was a mis-fielded one hopper, a missed scoop on the Buchholz check on the runner (even though they gave the error to Buchholz), and then he whipped the ball in a rush over to Pedroia which was offline and backed up by Gonzalez.
Whatever. Youkilis sucked and so did the rest of the offense.
By bs.uf15bosox9bears23 on Oct 22, 2009
Hey, “dude” here. I was just surprised by the calling out of Youk, when his struggles were likely the result of a small sample size. I’m not debating that he had a horrible postseason offensively – but
I do think I missed which plays you were talking about the first time I read this, and I apologize for that. The Papelbon mechanics page that I linked to in the same post was the one I should have put more emphasis on – it was really good.
By Darryl Johnston on Oct 23, 2009
Thanks for following up. I appreciate that. I figured we were looking at different things. Also, it was an emotional post that lacked any really rationaility. Sometimes I just like to complain and I really felt extremely disappointed by the team this postseason. Youkilis wasn’t the only culprit, but we have come to expect him to overcome the gravity of situations and lead with his glove and plate approach. That whole team looked glazed over.
I’m already on to the offseason. Rehashing this is aggravating me again!
Thank you for following up.
Darryl
By bs.uf15bosox9bears23 on Oct 23, 2009
No problem – I was also writing in an emotional state (for reasons outside of baseball as well). I’ll try to share links to anything you publish that is interesting – fair warning though, OTM is relatively sabermetric (or at least I’m doing my best to convert most of them), so you might get jumped on if your opinion is defended using “primitive” stats, as Theo would say.