Bumbling Beckett

    When I used to think about Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Josh Beckett, I would think about an exciting young player breaking into the league with the Florida Marlins. However, as I look at Josh Beckett now, he seems to be a bitter shell of the young phenom who  placed the tag on catcher Jorge Posada for the final out of the 2003 World Series against the New York Yankees.

Beckett making final out of 2003 World Series
against the Yankess

    It probably seems harsh to call Beckett a bitter shell of himself, but it seems that he has gone from an exciting young player eager to help his team win, to a lazy, unenthusiastic veteran who, more often than not, costs his team ballgames. You might be thinking: "Could he really cost his team games?" Let me give you a couple of numbers. A newer statistic, known as Wins Above Replacement (WAR), shows the true value of any single player to his team, factoring in every little thing a player does in a game. The WAR displays the average number of wins a player adds to his team's record just by being on the field. The higher the number is, the more valuable the player. First of all Beckett's WAR over his entire 10 year career is 0.8, meaning that the teams that Beckett was on are less than a single win better with him than without him. But to make my point, during the 2010 and 2012 seasons (both with Boston) Beckett's WAR was actually negative, which, if you're following correctly, that Beckett was, in fact, HURTING his team by playing.

    The most disappointing thing about Beckett is how little he seems to care about the game, his team or anyone else but himself. For those of you who have been following this blog, you may remember the August 21st "Boston Coaching Carousel" article that chronicled the struggles of the Boston Red Sox. These are lines from that article:  "...Terry Francona subsequently resigned after reports surfaced that he had "lost control" of the team and that many of the players, including starting pitchers Josh Beckett and Jon Lester, were drinking beer and eating chicken in the clubhouse during the game...Francona wasn't the problem and neither is Valentine...it's the players. So, we must ask the question: If these players wouldn't play for Francona, is there anyone they will play for?" 

   As you can see, Beckett was the ring-leader behind the "loss of control". Josh Beckett had given up on his team. His selfish ways continued in 2012, getting then-manager Bobby Valentine dispatched the same way he did Francona the year before. Beckett is what's wrong with the game today: He's lazy, selfish, and has a problem with authority. If I'm making him out to be a villan, that's his problem, because I'm going off of what I've seen from him. If he's not going to play the game it was meant to be played, then he needs to leave the game before his style of play-or lack thereof-becomes the league norm and destroys the game we love.

    Now don't think that I'm naive enough to think that Beckett is the only one that acts like this. I know there's many more, but I use Beckett as the example. Players like these, who act like they don't care about the game, need to understand that they are among the luckiest men in the world to play a game for a living. If they can't appreciate that, the game would be better off without them. They need to either change their mentality or fade into the sunset before their remembered and emulated by future ballplayers. The game was meant to be fun for everyone, and watching these players who don't care, hurt the spirits of the players and fans who do, goes against everything baseball stands for in America. To quote my previous piece: "Keep it classy"