Boston Red Sox: Most overrated players in franchise history (part 2)

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PHILADELPHIA, PA – MARCH, 1939: Joe Cronin, shortstop for the Boston Red Sox thinks about the upcoming season before a spring training game in March of 1939 in Shibe Park in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Photo Reproduction by Transcendental Graphics/Getty Images) /

Many Red Sox players had very good careers but have been overrated by fans. Here are five more whose stature is a bit larger than their careers may warrant.

Just as with the two parts listing some of the most underrated players in Red Sox history, we now turn our attention to part two of the most overrated. I went to great pains to explain in the first part of this article that “overrated” does not mean the same thing as bad but to no avail. As I expected, the majority of people missed that point entirely and reacted emotionally and hostilely while completely missing the points I was trying to make.

That’s fine and I have no problem with lively disagreement and debate, as long as it’s done in a civil manner (and for the most part, it wasn’t…such is the world we live in these days). I understand that so many fans have such an emotional attachment to some players that any criticism is seen as almost a direct attack on the fans themselves. As a lifelong, diehard Red Sox fan, I assure you that wasn’t my attention when deciding to write these articles.

Instead, my goal was to go against the conventional wisdom, go beyond the warm memories, and dig into the numbers a bit deeper to look at how and why some of these players, while still good (again, for emphasis), were, in my opinion, valued perhaps more than was warranted. All I ask is for you to actually read what is written and think about it a little before agreeing or disagreeing.

Disagreements are fine and spirited debate is welcomed. The following is a list of five more players who were well-loved and (mostly) remembered fondly by a majority of Red Sox fans, but who may be a bit overrated given their actual accomplishments and play on the field.

As always, in no particular order, let’s begin.

Johnny Pesky

A former player, manager, coach, and ambassador for the team, Johnny Pesky is one of the most beloved players in Red Sox history, although he’s mostly beloved for what he did after his playing career was finished. The team retired his number and he even has a famous foul pole named after him, the moniker bestowed by teammate (and underrated Red Sox player) Mel Parnell.

There are generations of Red Sox fans who consider Johnny Pesky a former star player, a teammate of Ted Williams who has been immortalized in a statue outside of Fenway Park and as one of the four “Teammates” (along with Williams, Bobby Doerr, and Dom DiMaggio) in the famous book by David Halberstam. His position as a Red Sox bench coach, instructor, and front office ambassador meant he was one of the longest-tenured former players in the franchise’s history.

He was a good man and loyal to the Red Sox for 61 years of his life, but his career numbers show that the legend built up after his playing days has obscured what he did during his time on the field. Pesky played eight of his ten major league seasons with the Red Sox, from 1942 to 1952 (while missing the 1943-1945 seasons due to his service in World War II).

He hit for a very good average, topping .300 in all but two of his seasons in Boston and finishing with a .294 average for his Red Sox career. He didn’t hit for much power, only hitting 13 home runs and 361 RBI for the Red Sox. He made one All-Star team in his career, in 1946. He did lead the league in hits in 1942, 1946, and 1947, topping 200 in each season.

As a fielder, the numbers show he was decent, finishing with a .964 fielding percentage although he did commit 111 errors (100 of them with the Red Sox). He’s also, unfortunately, most well known for his blunder in Game Seven of the 1946 World Series when he hesitated (according to the accounts of the time) and allowed Enos Slaughter to score the winning run.

While the right field foul pole is named after him, he only hit six career home runs at Fenway Park (and only one in a game Mel Parnell, who came up with the “Pesky Pole” name, pitched in). It may again be a case of myth obscuring fact as legions of New Englanders (including yours truly) grew up thinking Pesky was famous for hitting home run after home run off of that pole…why else would it be named that? (Obviously, it’s Parnell’s fault, not Pesky’s).

Johnny Pesky was a good man and a great ambassador for the Red Sox, but his beloved place in Red Sox history is more to do with how long he worked for the team and how nice he was than how great a player he was. He was solid but by far the weakest of the four Teammates. As a man and a loyal Red Sox, Pesky is deservedly loved, but as a player he’s overrated.

Mike Greenwell

As with all of the players I’m calling “overrated,” Mike Greenwell was still a very good player. He had the unfortunate distinction of being the next left fielder in unbroken succession after Ted Williams, Carl Yastrzemski, and Jim Rice, all Hall of Famers with their numbers retired by the team. Mike Greenwell had a solid career and gets the benefit of the doubt for the tough position he was in, but he also tends to get overrated by many fans.

First coming up to the big leagues in 1985 and spending his entire career in Boston until he retired in 1996, Greenwell in actuality had one great season (1988), a few very good seasons, and otherwise was a bit disappointing. During the great season in question (1988), he hit .325 with 22 home runs and 119 RBI while finishing second in the AL MVP voting to Jose Canseco.

For his entire career, Greenwell hit a very nice .303 with 130 home runs and 736 RBI in 1269 games. Digging into his stats a bit deeper, though, shows that the only season he topped 20 home runs was in his career-best 1988 season; the same is true for topping the 100 RBI mark. He reached double-digits in home runs seven times and played in 125 games or more seven times in his twelve seasons while making two All-Star teams (1988 and 1989) and winning a Silver Slugger award (1988).

Mike Greenwell had a nice career and was a good player for the Red Sox. Red Sox fans always sympathized with Greenwell, acknowledging the pressure he was under as the team’s left fielder after Jim Rice and admitting that while he didn’t continue the Hall of Fame legacy of the position, he held it down admirably. However, over the last couple of decades, the consensus has seemed to be that “Greenwell wasn’t as good as Ted/Yaz/Rice, but he was still a great player.”

“Great” is too strong a word (and I say this as someone who grew up watching Greenwell play). He was good (oftentimes very good), reliable, dependable, consistent, but not “great” and because of that, he’s become (through no fault of his own) a bit overrated in the years since he retired.

Joe Cronin

Joe Cronin had a long and varied career in baseball, spending twenty years in the league as a player and manager before becoming president of the American League for an additional fourteen years. He spent the majority of his career (the final eleven seasons) with the Red Sox as their shortstop from 1935 to 1945, had his number retired by the team, and is in the Hall of Fame.

When looking back at Red Sox players from his era, Cronin is always cited as one of the greats. But a deeper dive shows that while his best seasons were in Boston, that only encompassed five of his two decades as a player. As a member of the Washington Senators for seven seasons prior to arriving in Boston, Cronin was one of the top shortstops in the game, winning the AL MVP award in 1930 and leading the Senators to a pennant in 1933.

He was traded to the Red Sox in 1935 and had a couple of down seasons, hitting .295 with 9 home runs and 95 RBI in 1935 and .281 with 2 home runs and 43 RBI in 1936. He returned to his usual production for the next five seasons, hitting over .300 in four of those years while hitting between 18 and 24 home runs each season (the highest totals of his career). However, after 1941 he went into serious decline and stopped being an everyday player.

From 1942 to his final season in 1945, Cronin batted over .300 three times but only hit 14 total home runs and 82 total RBI in 183 games. In totality, he had five great seasons and six average-to-poor seasons in Boston, finishing his Red Sox career with a .304 average, 119 home runs, and 737 RBI. He made five All-Star teams with the Red Sox in 1935, 1937,1938, 1939, and 1941.

Cronin was player-manager of the Red Sox from 1935-1945 and then just manager in 1946 and 1947. He won one pennant in Boston (1946) and compiled a 906-777 record as the team’s skipper. After stepping down as manager, he took over as General Manager of the Red Sox from 1947 to 1959.

Cronin was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1956 on the tenth ballot and while his career numbers (.301 BA, 170 HR, 1424 RBI, 2285 H) warranted it, he really only had seven great seasons where he hit for both high average and power (i.e. double-digit home runs) seven times (twice in Washington, five times in Boston). Like Pesky, his reverence amongst Red Sox fans (and the team itself) seems to have more to do with his years of service to the club more than what he did on the field.

Jimmy Piersall

The 1950s were a bad decade for the Red Sox as they struggled just to finish at the middle or bottom of the American League for the entire decade. While Ted Williams concluded his legendary career during the course of the decade, the Red Sox did have some really good players alongside him, including Jackie Jensen. Another who gets mentioned as one of the stars of that lost decade is Jimmy Piersall.

“The Waterbury Wizard” (as he called himself, much to the annoyance of his teammates) came up with the Red Sox in 1950 and spent until 1958 with the team as their center fielder. However, his play on the field was overshadowed by his bizarre behavior, multiple physical altercations with opponents and teammates, demotions to the minor leagues, and numerous ejections.

Piersall underwent therapy for months in 1953 before returning to the Red Sox for good and he became famous in 1955 when he published his book Fear Strikes Out which detailed his struggles with bipolar disorder in an era when mental illness wasn’t very well understood or openly discussed. This was later turned into a feature film in 1957, further raising Piersall’s profile.

When looking at his numbers with the Red Sox, though, Piersall was good but not great. In eight seasons as the Red Sox center fielder, he batted .273 with 66 home runs and 366 RBI. Apart from his first two seasons, Piersall played in 130 or more games in every season and he made two All-Star teams (1954 and 1956) and won a Gold Glove with the Sox in 1958.

While he’s not looked back upon as a franchise legend, he was inducted into the Red Sox Hall of Fame and is routinely pointed out as one of their stars of the 1950s. If it weren’t for his mental health struggles and the higher profile it brought (he was quoted as saying “the best thing that ever happened to me was going nuts. Whoever heard of Jimmy Piersall until that happened?”), that probably wouldn’t be the case.

Jason Varitek

I’m expecting the same blowback for this one that I got for Carl Yastrzemski in part one, and I’ll preface it by saying the same thing as before: Jason Varitek was a very, very good player for the Red Sox and their best catcher since Carlton Fisk. He was a key member of two World Series teams and one of the most popular Red Sox players of the last twenty years (in large part for what he did to Alex Rodriguez as shown in the famous photo above).

However, Varitek would seem to fall more into the “all-time favorite” category of former Red Sox, not an all-time great. Perhaps a better way of putting it would be that he was not overrated as a catcher, especially given the evolution of the position by the time he played, but rather he is overrated as an overall player by the majority of Red Sox fans.

The numbers certainly bear that out. Varitek finished his fifteen-year career (all with the Red Sox, as I’m sure everyone reading this knows) with a .256 average, 193 home runs, 757 RBI, and 1307 hits in 1546 career games. In the postseason, he was a career .237 hitter with 11 home runs and 33 RBI in 63 postseason games…not great numbers, but he did have several big hits.