The regining NL Comeback Player Of The Year will continue to toil at Chavez Ravine ; 1B Nomar Garciaparra signed a two-year deal with the Dodgers on Sunday, days after his former Boston teammate Bill Mueller accepted a position in LA’s front office after retiring due to knee troubles.
The Dallas Morning News’ Evan Grant reports the Rangers, rebuffed in their efforts to sign Frank Thomas, have inked DH Frank Catalanotto to a three year, $13 million pact. For those of you who lost track of Catalanotto since his performances alongside Claire Danes on “My So Called Life,” he’s been playing baseball of late in a place called Canada, and did rather well last season (.300 BA, .376 OBP, 131 hits).
While his colleague Wally Matthews has already penned a love letter to Derek Jeter this weekend, Newsday’s Ken Davidoff casts his hypothetical AL MVP vote in favor of Minnesota’s Justin Morneau.
We all know that as much as Jeter did to help the Yankees prevail in 2006, he could have done more.
Yes, that is a reference to the Alex Rodriguez stuff.
If Jeter hit 34 homers and tallied a .559 slugging percentage, his clubhouse conduct wouldn’t even be scrutinized. But the Yankees’ captain hit 14 homers and compiled a .483 slugging percentage. That’s a significant enough difference to take into consideration. There is no more valuable play in the game, after all, than the home run, and Morneau more than doubled Jeter’s total.
There’s irony that, for so many years, media folks have extolled Jeter’s praises, saying his statistics don’t fully explain his value. This year, his stats speak very well to his value.