NO NOMAR, PLEASE

Not surprisingly, with Edgar Renteria gone and the Red Sox looking for help at short-stop, the name of Nomar Garciaparra has popped up, after swinging at the first pitch. Already, there are two online petition sites to bring Nomar back. As far as I can tell, there are NO "Bring Back Pedro" sites out there. Boston fans can be really stupid sometimes.

Here are some reasons why Nomar Garciaparra should never ever be on the Boston Red Sox again.

1. He gets injured way too much. Last year, he missed 100 games. In 2004, he missed 81. In 2001 he missed 141. Do we really want a guy like that on our team? He's going to be on the DL at least once in the season and every time he gets hurt, his play gets worse.

2. He isn't exactly the Nomar of the 1990's. Up until the 2001 season, Nomar was one of the best players in baseball. In 2003, he had a very good year with us, but since then injuries have really plagued his play and his stats.

3. He's never been a great defensive player. He's amde 25 errors in a season twice in his career. Edgar Renteria's fielding percentage last year was .954. Nomar's career fielding percentage at SS is .968. That means in 2005 Edgar only made one more error than Nomar does in every 100 chances. (a SS gets about 700 chances a year so the difference between Nomar 1996-2005 and Edgar 2005 is about an error every 23 games, or 7 extra errors a season. That is a somewhat big number, but consider how bad Edgar played defensively. 23 errors in the same # of chances isn't very good either).

4. Can he even play SS anymore? His range, which was one of his best defensive attributes, will be greatly reduced after numerous leg injuries. Last year, he played 43% of his games at third base for the Cubs. We already have several players at 3B, and a full-time DH. So the place to put him would be 1st base. He wouldn't even be able to play SS a full season, I don't think, which means we'd have to spend a lot on a backup which means we'd have to reduce our spending elsewhere.

5. Do we want him back in the clubhouse? Wasn't it made fairly clear in 2004 that he was detrimental to the clubhouse? Didn't the attitude of the team lighten up just a little bit once he was traded? Statistically, one can see a big difference from the team with Nomar and the team without Nomar.

Nomar was traded on July 31. On August 1, 2004, the Red Sox were 56-46 (.549). In their last 60 games, they went 42-18. That is precisely .700 baseball. They upped their winning percentage by over .050 points and finished at 98-64 (.605). That is the most wins in Red Sox regular season history since 1978. The Red Sox didn't stop there, though. They went on to beat the Angels 3-0, then come back and beat the Yankees 4-3, then sweep St. Louis in 4 games. That combined 11-3 (.787) makes the record for the Red Sox in 2004 109-67 (.619), that is tied with the 1912 Red Sox for the most total wins in a season. Without Nomar and including the playoffs, the Red Sox went 53-21 (.716). That is a HUGE difference from the barely over .500 ball that had been played up until that point.

Now, after all that, do you really want to bring back someone whose absence, or at least whose replacement, seemed to help us?