Tuesday, July 27, 2004 |
In Oakland, They Really Don't Karros: Rockies 7, Dodgers 2
Yeah, the right answer is (a).
In other Dodger news, Jon posts a eulogy on Eric Karros' DFA by the A's. As I said there, Karros predates me by a few years. I really started paying attention to baseball (again) in 2001, so Karros' last good year -- 1999 -- was history; he never had good seasons after that, and he really only had two quality years, that and 1995. In 1996, he hit more homers, but his average took a precipitous drop, from .298 to .260. His OPS never topped .900 more than twice in his career, though measured by VORP he's a little better, but not much. In fact, he only ranked in the top five of National League first basemen once in his career:
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Karros wasn't the couch slug Mondesi was, but neither did he ever perform consistently. He did just well enough to earn the big bucks, but during his contract, never quite lived up to his billing.
The Diamond Angle has a good article about Steve Garvey and why he's not really Hall-of-Fame material. Those same arguments could be thrown at Karros, and Karros can't hold a candle to Garvey. Garvey was one of the NL's top five first basemen by VORP from 1974 through 1980. The Jamesian Hall of Fame monitor shows Karros with a score of 29, and Garvey with a score of 130. The Dodger hype machine had Karros tagged as the next Sure Thing; but he wasn't sure, not by a long shot. Had DePo been running the show while he was in town, I'm quite certain he'd have done the same thing Evans eventually did with him, and ship him to the first place needing salary relief.
(Incidentally, Kevin Malone gained infamy by writing spectacularly bad contracts, but perhaps we don't have all the information in just yet. Surely, there is a case to be made in his defense. I don't say it's a strong one, but so harsh blows the wind in the other direction that it seems something must by now have been overlooked.)
Goodbye, Eric; I'm sure it wasn't the career you'd hoped for. For both me and my wife, I think the most memorable moment will be the key home run he hit off Yankee reliever Juan Acevedo in last year's interleague games. Ironic that that moment should happen while he was a Cub, the team Dan Evans traded him to after spending the whole of his previous career as a Dodger. Who knows -- maybe he can go back to selling jeans.
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