As Magglio Ordonez toils (as much as one can toil for $15M/year) with a Detroit Tigers club that's struggling to reach .500, he told the
Detroit Free Press that he thinks about what might've been sometimes:
"It's hard to see your teammates win the World Series," Ordonez said.
"You spent your whole career there and left one year early. I didn't
know they were going to win the World Series."
Neither did we.
Of course, Magglio can be consoled by the fact that if he were there, the Sox wouldn't have won the World Series. They probably wouldn't have even made the playoffs.
It'd be one thing if Magglio spent half of 2005 injured because of a freak accident (like banging knees with Willie Harris, for example). That you can't take into account if you put him in a different situation. However, he barely started the season for the Tigers before going on the DL for months at a time thanks to a viral infection and a pre-existing hernia, making it rough for him to even start Spring Training.
Put him in the Sox lineup, and it's likely that Comiskey Park would've hosted a three- or four-headed monster once again in right field. Some combination of Joe Borchard, Timo Perez, Ross Gload, Brian Anderson, and God knows who else for half the season. Instead, we saw Jermaine Dye play 145 games and provide some sorely needed power. Maggs put up a nicer on-base percentage, but Jermaine's .512 slugging clip was much more valuable than the one Maggs put up in Detroit (.436), even adjusting for the bigger park. If Jermaine got on base more but didn't grab as many bases, who knows if anybody would've driven him in anyway.
The Sox didn't have a terrible offense last year, but they definitely needed every run they scored. So many games were decided by one run that I think half a season of Magglio and half a season of Timo Borchard would have broken their backs. I don't often dive into WARP and VORP, so I'd appreciate those who are more familiar with those stats to tell me what those metrics would have to say about this.
Also from Tiger camp:Dmitri Young has reported to camp (thanks to Matt for the link), and there's a noted difference in his preseason trash talk. See if you can spot it!
2005: "(Cleveland) is our rival right here. Forget the
other teams. I think it's going to come down to us and them. Just look
at the different positions, look at the matchups. The matchups are
pretty similar." When a
reporter asked him about Minnesota, Young shrugged. "Us and Cleveland,"
he said.
2006: Young also
took a veiled shot at former manager Alan Trammell's
coaching staff. "With the players that we have,
we've got a staff that's going to be able to take
us to the next level,'' Young said.
I wouldn't call that "looking inside oneself," but he's getting there.