Many excellent Red Sox players are forgotten about or simply underappreciated. Here is part two of a look at the most underrated in team history.
In part one of this series, we took a look at five of the most underrated players in Boston Red Sox history. These were players who Red Sox fans liked (or maybe they didn’t) during their careers who are now overlooked for their contributions to the team. As with anything to do with discussing players who are underrated (or overrated), there is a slight degree of subjectivity involved.
In looking at both who I consider to be underrated and overrated in Red Sox history, I’ve been trying to be as objective as possible by using statistics to bolster my arguments in either case. Numbers don’t tell the whole story, though, so some blend of objectively looking at both their numbers and performance while removing emotion from the equation is the way I’ve tried to approach these lists.
Lastly, I’ve had some interesting discussions on the commonality shared between the terms overrated/underrated and popularity. This is something to keep in mind with these lists and another reason why I’m trying to use statistics to bolster my cases with each player. It’s inevitable that popularity comes into the equation, though, because what is being underrated if not being overlooked and not as popular as others think?
Conversely, overrated would be the state of being more popular than your numbers would indicate you “deserve” (again, some subjectivity seeping into the mix). It’s an imperfect, inexact science and there is no pleasing everybody, but I’m hoping the disagreements can at least be settled civilly without personal attacks and insults (which, judging by the Facebook comments to part one of my overrated players article, seems highly unlikely).
As always, in no particular order, let’s begin.