{"id":1021,"date":"2009-06-18T12:34:16","date_gmt":"2009-06-18T17:34:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sox35th.com\/?p=1021"},"modified":"2009-06-18T12:35:28","modified_gmt":"2009-06-18T17:35:28","slug":"of-pudges-and-persistence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.sox35th.com\/index.php\/1021\/of-pudges-and-persistence","title":{"rendered":"Of Pudges and Persistence"},"content":{"rendered":"

It has always bothered me to no end hearing people refer to Ivan Rodriguez as “Pudge,” as though the juicing<\/a> and backpedaling<\/a> somehow put him in the company of possibly the surliest, toughest backstop of all-time. It’s as though playing the same position as one of the all-time greats – one whose career Rodriguez actually overlapped for two seasons – warranted a cheapening of someone else’s hard-fought term of endearment.<\/p>\n

Not that Rodriguez hasn’t assembled a résumé for the ages, but the problems in drawing parallels between he and Fisk run much deeper than that.<\/p>\n

Imagine a road team’s announcer calling Adam Dunn “Big Hurt,” or baseball cards regaling the accomplishments of Carl “Junior” Crawford. It just doesn’t work, because those names, those identities<\/em>, are already taken by grossly different players, and there we start to approach the real reason Ivan Rodriguez is not – and never will be – Carlton Fisk.<\/p>\n

Fisk’s highlight reel reads like a playbook on how to play bare-knuckled baseball. The home run at the foul pole<\/a>. Schooling Neon Deion<\/a>, a man 20 years his junior. Tagging out two at home<\/a> on the same play<\/em>. The last great gunslinging rivalry<\/a>. Shredding his knees to stay in the game. Putting up with disastrous decisions by a temp worker general manager<\/a> and coming out stronger for it, even when the team he loved turned its back on him<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Those are what either camp of Sox fan – Red, White – thinks of when you say “Pudge.” No one thinks of a slick-fielding kid hitting a lot of home runs for a franchise only good for hitting home runs<\/a>. No one thinks of a bat-for-hire coincidentally losing a considerable amount of weight<\/a> just as steroid testing gets serious. No one thinks of a name being named in a book that’s proved surprisingly, almost horrifyingly accurate<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So when they talk about the new high-water mark<\/a> for games played as a catcher, they will all, of course, get it wrong. Pudge didn’t break that record yesterday; Ivan Rodriguez did.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There can be only one and, depending on who you ask, there still is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[468,35,470,71,469],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sox35th.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1021"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sox35th.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sox35th.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sox35th.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sox35th.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1021"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.sox35th.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1021\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1024,"href":"http:\/\/www.sox35th.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1021\/revisions\/1024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sox35th.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sox35th.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sox35th.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}