Even coaches of 8 year old baseball teams know this word very well: hustle.
It's a simple concept that is ever present while ever amplified in every level of sports. You run as hard as you can, you dive with as little regard for you own health as possible. In baseball, you slide or dive, in soccer you sprint full out for an hour and a half and in football and hockey well, you break your ribs, you puncture your lung but still you play.
In youth sports it’s called hustle, in the world of pro sports it’s called sacrifice but for the Boston Red Sox this elusive form of devotion is simply called ‘what Jarrod Saltilamaccia and Dustin Pedroia do’.
Between the two of them, it is clear that there are really a select few teams in this MLB that have the kind of guys that the Red Sox. For Dustin Pedroia, his sacrifice shows in the constant line of sprawling stops that he constantly shows on a daily basis.
For Jarrod Saltilamaccia, his moments of sacrifice can be fairly captured by the sheer numbers that dominate his star sheet.
For Saltilamaccia his first taste of big league action came in 2003 when he was drafted 36th overall by the Atlanta Braves. As it stood, Saltilamaccia would spend 2 years in the minors batting .314 and.373 in single A and double A respectively.
But before long, he was in the big leagues joining the Braves in 2007 and notching 47 starts before they needed to clear him off their roster. The man with the longest name in the history of baseball was either going back to the minors or to another team. The Texas Ranger’s made sure that the fate ‘Salty’ was treated to was the latter of those two. In 2007, Jarrod Saltalamaccia was traded to the Texas Rangers.
But before long, Salty was a Red Sox and by 2011 he was once again a top starter. With Jason Varitek still firmly instituted as Boston’s catcher, Saltilamaccia admittedly spent 2011 as a student to his veteran teammate.
Saltilamaccia played 103 games in 2011 but after the September collapse that left his team in disgrace his workload threatened to increase even more after Varatek announced his retirement on March 1st 2012.
In 2012 Salty started 121 games as the struggling Kelley Shoppach made it painful for Sox fans to see Salty sitting on the bench. 121 games is a lot, almost 75% of the season in fact but in this 2013 season, Jarrod Saltilamaccia had blown it all away and is on pace not only top that career high in games set in 2011 but possibly climb onto the all-time leader board of appearances by a Red Sox catcher in one season.
To date, Saltilamaccia has started 100 games and with 33 games left in the season he is mathematically projected to bring his season start total to 127. But for the Sox that branch of statistics will likely be influenced by a factor that cannot be captured by any sort of mathematical computation.
With the Sox, Rays, Orioles and even Yankees now knotted in a pennant race for the history books many of the “big games” that now dominate the list of Boston’s 33 matchups between now and the end of the year will likely fall on the shoulders of Jarrod Saltilamaccia meaning that the possibility of a 130 start season might not be that far off.
But workload dose not even matter if you cannot produce on a consistent basis. Now more than ever, Saltilamaccia has done just that.
“There was a stretch there I was getting kind of sore. When I got to Houston and Kansas City I was pretty beat,” said Saltalamacchia, in a WEEI interview on August 20th “But I want to be in every single day. I’m not a guy who is going to take a day off.”
Even while playing 29 fewer games than many other players on the Sox, Saltalamaccia leads the Red Sox in doubles with 34. He has notched together countless hitting streaks, the most recent of which spanning 9 games. He has belted 10 home runs but for mighty Saltilamaccia, while his offence is treasured, his pitchers appreciate a far more crucial facet of the game.
He is dominant, in games that he has caught, the Sox have a winning percentage of over .600.
Pitchers like wins and Saltilamaccia helps guide them to them. It is as simple as that.
No what Saltilamaccia does is spectacular in it of itself. The sheer numbers that he complies, the unthinkable piles of starts and onslaughts of doubles show to the fullest what he can do. But for Dustin Pedroia there is no kind of number that can capture the facet of Pedroia’s game that makes him so wonderfully skilled: effort.
He had played his entire career to date with the Red Sox and will likely end it that way after he signed a monster multi-million dollar contract a few months back. He has played 128 games this year, missing just one of his team’s 129.
But like I said before, much of Dustin Pedroia’s game cannot be adequately represented by simple numbers.
His swing: violent and crushing. He has an almost non-existent leg kick meaning that he swings from the shoulders whipping his arms, legs and hips in a brutal speedy fashion. Such a swing does not agree with the human body. Such a swing takes a toll on a human’s body after 3,898 at bats. You get hurt, and Dustin Pedroia is no different.
He breaks thumbs, damages ankles but still he plays. In 2012 he broke his thumb but was back in action within 11 games, a spectacularly short healing time for a bone broken in half. 1 year later Pedroia broke bones once again when midway through an 8th inning affair with the Yankees, he fouled a ball hard off his left foot.
He fell to the ground writhing in obvious pain but in the end after X-Rays came back showing that Pedroia could play…he did.
He fell to the ground writhing in obvious pain but in the end after X-Rays came back showing that Pedroia could play…he did.
"Pedey's a gamer, man," said Red Sox outfielder Shane Victorino. "You never see that guy back down from a challenge. It's impressive. He wanted to stay in that at-bat. I sure it was killing him and he was hurting, but that just shows who he is and what he is. It's impressive. I'll take him on my team any day."
Dustin Pedroia and Jarrod Saltilamaccia. Two men, two positions, two styles of play all with one thing in common: commitment, hustle and above all…sacrafice.
0 comments:
Post a Comment