Red Sox acquire Zack Short

YTF

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I'm talking about him being a bad hitter and apparently just an okay fielder. Whatever smarts or leadership or whatever else he brings to the table aren't going to make up for those two things.

Sorry if you thought this was a personal attack - it wasn't meant to be.
I didn't take it personally, but the qualifier of "scrappy white guys" seemed a bit fucked up to me.
 

joe dokes

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I didn't take it personally, but the qualifier of "scrappy white guys" seemed a bit fucked up to me.
I cant speak for Frye, but in my experience over many decades of baseball observing, the term "scrappy," as used by writers and other commentators, was rarely applied to non-white players. I think it was either Baseball Prospectus, FireJoeMorgan, or Deadspin (when it was good) that tried to quantify the phenomenon.
 
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I didn't take it personally, but the qualifier of "scrappy white guys" seemed a bit fucked up to me.
It's an extremely well-documented phenomenon that white players -- particularly white players who aren't very good -- are much more likely to be praised for hustle and smarts than non-white players.
 

cannonball 1729

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I cant speak for Frye, but in my experience over many decades of baseball observing, the term "scrappy," as used by writers and other commentators, was rarely applied to non-white players. I think it was either Baseball Prospectus, FireJoeMorgan, or Deadspin (when it was good) that tried to quantify the phenomenon.
Yeah - this was a recurring joke/meme in the early-2000's. When advanced stats were first coming into popular consciousness, the counterpoint was always to highlight players who "played the game the right way"...and those players almost always seemed to be small white guys who couldn't hit, generally in the Nick Punto/David Eckstein mold.

The best of these was when Holiday Inn came up with the Holiday Inn Look Again Player of the Year Award to recognize, in their words, "role players who sacrifice for their team in often unrecognized effort." Strangely enough, their nominees pretty much all happened to be white guys. (And of course, David Eckstein was the runaway winner.) Deadspin and (especially) Fire Joe Morgan had a field day with that one.
 

TrotNixonRing

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FJM did it up nicely. One article was pretty egregious where the in a scrappy vs un-scrappy / non-gamer article, overwhelmingly white players were in the first group and players of color in the second.

David Eckstein, miniature king of the scrappy, say no more, man is an albino.

Others that got media coverage for being scrappy: Erstad, Rowand, and yes our boy Trot.
 

richgedman'sghost

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I'm not disagreeing. I was just piling onto Frye's (accurate) baseball tropes, which may or may not underscore other issues that may or may not be appropriate for this thread.
You implying racial undertones to that analysis without actually implying that there are racial undertones. It's like the old David Eckstein tropes before he became decent. You don't hear the same things being said about many African American players.
 

joe dokes

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You implying racial undertones to that analysis without actually implying that there are racial undertones. It's like the old David Eckstein tropes before he became decent. You don't hear the same things being said about many African American players.
Im not sure what this means.
Ill chalk it up to me being unclear. The several posters also recalling the history of "scrappiness" did it better than I did.
I *thought* Frye was recalling and making fun of the old "scrappiness" trope. I dunno, maybe Frye was really calling Short "scrappy" as a compliment, but I doubt it.
 

Red(s)HawksFan

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So Short starts at 2B today and presumably Grissom is activated tomorrow (for Dalbec or Hamilton) to be the regular starter moving forward?
 

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Humphrey

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I guess Zach's time in Boston wasn't very long.

There's got to be a snappier way of writing that.

It was, jeez, what's the word I want to use here? Uh. The opposite of long. Minuscule? Small? Abbreviated? Crisp? Shortened? Terse?

I'll never know. :(
Don't feel like going back but I got trashed by someone a week or so ago for calling him a "short timer". The respondent felt that he was the utility infielder of the Sox' dreams and would be around for the forseeable future. I couldn't see the attraction of a player w/a .169 career batting average.