Pete Abraham would be a really good replacement for Cafardo on the Sunday Baseball Notes column. He has the skill, he has the contacts and I think that he'd bring an air of freshness to the section. Speier would be a good choice too, but he's been on the beat for less time than Abraham and I don't know if he has the same amount of contact numbers in his phone (though I would think that with the good work he's been doing, I bet they're climbing).
And SJH is right, everything I've read about Cafardo is how nice of a guy he is ... and he might be. But I don't care about whether he's a nice guy or not (and to be honest, I'm not sure how "nice of a guy" you can be when you're taking potshots at guy who can't read English and is playing a couple hundred miles away from where your paper is being circulated*) what I care about is if the dude can write about baseball in an intelligent way. He can't. It's not even the fact that I disagree with him on practically every baseball argument, it's that it's so clear where his loyalties lie. Boras, Riccardi, gritty white guys, old nameless scouts; we've heard it all before. Those angles have been worked so hard by Cafardo over the years that they're practically spherical.
Would it kill the guy to leave the press buffet for a minute and learn a little something about even the most elementary of advanced statistics? I suck at math, but even I can figure out most of this stuff. Speier does it every day and Abraham does too, it's not difficult to learn or even educate your readers. That's what bothers me most about Cafardo, he's so god damn lazy. If he wants to editorialize ask to solely be a baseball columnist. I don't know why he's doing any sort of reporting at all.
* What really pissed me off about the Moncada incident is how much of a pussy Cafardo was about it. Number one, he's picking on a 20-year-old Cuban kid. I'm pretty sure that Moncada speaks through an interpreter, so the chances are pretty good that he's not going to read this. Secondly, I know that the Internet exists, but I doubt that any of the Sox read Cafardo's baseball column unless it's jammed in their faces. Since they're in Florida, that probably didn't happen. Third, wasn't he just writing about Yankee prospect Aaron Judge and what a free spirit he is? Or as Cafardo called him, "The Gronk of the Yankees?" Why are his antics funny, but Moncada driving around in a new car so pearl-clutching?
Nick Cafardo is precisely the type of person Bryce Harper was talking about to ESPN. You know why baseball's shitheel unwritten rules are still around, because people like Nick Cafardo keep them there. Why? I have no idea, but they're the same people who unironically refer to the NFL as "The Shield". They're humorless twits who think that they need to puff up the subjects that they're covering in order to give their shallow, stupid lives any meaning.
