Oh how I was taught wrong...

I started watching baseball intensely around 1998. Sammy Sosa instantly became my hero when I saw him battle with Mark McGwire for the home run record. One corked bat, many "I appologi.." coming out his mouth, numerous steroid allegations and a busted boom box later, not so much. I decided that I wanted to look for something more in a sports hero. Since ESPN was my sports bible at the time, I subconsciously looked there. Only then was I brainwashed to think that I was missing many things in my sports heroes - Energy! Passion! Spark! Grit!

From that point on, I had grown to appreciate the scrappy player who was fast and stole bases, colloquially known as "Grinders." So of course, I thought that players like David Eckstein, Juan Pierre, Scott Podsednik and Darrin Erstad were the prototypical heroes of sports. Because they apparently had this undying fire and passion that could only be explained by their love of the game.

Boy was I wrong and brainwashed.

These guys actually were puke. They usually posted high batting averages and had a high number of stolen bases, but is this actually valuable in baseball? No! These players typically posted a mediocre to bad on-base percentage, a horrible slugging percentage, and were notoriously praised for bunting and stealing bases all the time, a technique commonly referred to as "Smallball" or "Smartball." I don't know what these people consider smart, because if you just look here, you can see that the least amount of runs scored are when people don't get on base, and that fewer runs are scored when outs are traded for them. These people are just mediocre, at best, players. That is all. People can talk all they want about these players giving a spark and energy to their, but they don't. If you want to look for a spark for a team, a firework lighting off in a team's dugout would give more spark to a team.

So why Ryan Theriot's Socks, you ask? Because Ryan "The Riot" Theriot (ooh, extra scrappy nickname!) was the last player I would ever like coming from this category of "Grinders." I even bought a Theriot Cubs shirt. When I finally stopped listening to the nonsense of ESPN and realized that he is just as valuable to baseball as Smirnoff Ice is to a man's social life, I created this blog. This blog is intended to reference all the erroneous appraisal these kinds of players get in sports media, in an effort to bring a certain phrase to people's attention: Say No to Ryan Theriot!