A-Gone

As mentioned before, Adrian Gonzalez has just one homerun since the all-star break. But upon further review, it's a tad worse than that. Since June 18, Gonzalez has stood in the batter's box 254 times. He has exactly three homeruns. To be fair, he's hit .330/.398/.442, with an OPS of .840 in those 55 games. In a different world, this would be more than satisfactory. But here's the thing--the Sox lineup has hit the dog days with three all-stars out, and Mike Aviles isn't gonna carry the offense. The power outage is going to continue to put a damper on things, and Gonzalez needs to step up. The sad thing is, though the Boston will likely survive the drought, he's hitting himself out of the MVP race.

Here's a look at the MLB leaders in fWAR as of today:

WAR:
Jose Bautista 7.7
Dustin Pedroia 6.9
Jacoby Ellsbury 6.6
Ben Zobrist 6.4
Justin Upton 6.2
(www.fangraphs.com)

Notice that four out of the top five are AL hitters, and two of those are teammates. At least Gonzalez's mini-slide will help Ellsbury's and Pedroia's MVP cases. Obviously, WAR isn't the be-all and end-all of stats, but it is a pretty decent measuring stick of a player's worth. Gonzalez is sitting at 5.0 fWAR at the moment.

Also worth noting, is the fact that Gonzalez has driven in Carl Crawford just three times all season. Granted, the pricey outfielder hasn't hit in front of the former Padre much, but if Theo Epstein was told about this before the season started (among other things), he might have thought twice about Crawford's deal. Just sayin'.

--------------------------------------------------------------

AND ANOTHER THING:

I won't go on and on about Starlin Castro and what's wrong with today's athlete, plenty of others have done that today already. But I recently read RZA's autobiography The Tao of Wu, and couldn't help but think of the parallels with the hip-hop mega group circa 1997. As anyone who went to see Wu-Tang in those days can attest, you were lucky if you saw three or four out of the nine members at any given show on any given night. With guys as talented as that, it was sad to see them waste it at their peak by pissing off their fans. All they had to do was show up and do their thing. Castro hasn't hit his peak yet (probably), but his spaceout on national TV last night brought that to mind, and made me a little sad. Freakin' entertainers.