The Rise and Fall of Fandom, Part I: Dustin Pedroia
The next two blog posts are both inspired by requests from readers. The first comes from one of my very good friends from grad school, Ben, and the other comes from one of my friends from undergrad, Dennis. Thank you both for being consistent readers of this blog, it means a lot to me!
I spent the majority of my childhood as a diehard fan of the Boston Red Sox, but my baseball fandom was born through a different franchise, the New York Yankees. My dad, the man who introduced me to the game and fostered my love for it, is a Yankees fan. As most children do, I absorbed my dad’s fandom and spent the early days of my interest in the sport as a Yankees fan. However, when I went to school, most of my friends were Red Sox fans. I did the unthinkable (and was later punished for it by the very team that I chose to root for, but more on that in the second iteration of this piece), I switched allegiances from the Yankees to the Red Sox.
One of the reasons that I fell so hard for the less successful of the two franchises was because of their second baseman, Dustin Pedroia. 2007 was a pivotal year for my baseball experience, it was the second year that I played organized baseball and was absolutely obsessed with the game. I loved watching it, I loved playing it, and I loved making my dad practice it with me until he told me it was time to go home. 2007 was also Dustin Pedroia’s first full year in the majors, and ended up being a World Series-winning-year for the Red Sox. Everything lined up for a young Max, rooting for his dad’s least favorite team.
If you know me in real life, you know that I am not very tall. I’m actually not tall at all. At 5’8”, I stand an inch shorter than the average American man. If you know anything about professional athletes, you know that they are often not comparable, physically, to a normal human. That heuristic stands true with baseball, even though you will get the occasional Bartolo “Big Sexy” Colon:
Those kinds of outliers are balanced out by outliers like Giancarlo Stanton, who is actually big and sexy:
One of the things that I most enjoy about baseball is that there are many, many different body types that can be present in the most successful of the sport’s athletes. While short baseball players aren’t quite as rare as short basketball players, the bigger and stronger you are, the better you will be. Dustin Pedroia was the player who kept my hopes alive that someday, I could be a professional baseball player too, he stood at a mere “5’9”” (I put that in quotes because he played at a time where if your listed height was 6’0” you were probably 5’10”, Pedroia was in the neighborhood of 5’7”). Pedroia himself has admitted that his listed height was a few inches north of where he actually stands. But I digress, Pedroia’s height was one thing, but the way he played baseball was something else entirely.
I will always remember Pedroia for the seasons that he spent flailing around on the infield dirt, legs kicking in every direction once he dove up the middle to backhand a sharply hit liner. He was a phenomenal fielder, but the way he did it wasn’t exactly pretty. He was all grit and dirt and hard-nosed baseball, it was the style of play you would expect out of a ballplayer his size. His style of play is often referred to as scrappy, and I feel as though the word itself is evocative of the way that he played. Something about his general attitude towards the game felt like a stray dog fighting for scraps, but when you stand back and look at his career, he was on a Hall of Fame trajectory until his injuries wore him out late in 2017. Playing in just 105 games that year, he was still able to put together 2.6 WAR, putting him on pace for 4 WAR, an All Star level season. However, over the next two years—his final two in MLB—he managed to play just nine games, collecting a mere three hits.
Until his unceremonious end, Pedroia was one of the most talented players in the big leagues. Any baseball player on the wrong side of 5’9” is going to have a soft spot in my heart, but one who managed to be among the best in the game? That is something special.
My memory of him begins in the 2007 playoffs. That season, I followed the Red Sox every day in the papers (I know, I know), I checked the box score of the games before walking to fifth grade. While Pedroia had an incredible year, he was not the Red Sock who I was checking the paper for every morning. Instead, I was enamored with Josh Beckett—the ace starting pitcher—and David “Big Papi” Ortiz, whose career in Boston elevated him to something of a folk hero to New England sports fans. I don’t remember watching many games on TV that year until the playoffs started. At that point my parents let me stay up a little later to watch the games.
In the World Series, against the Colorado Rockies, Pedroia tore the cover off of the ball. My clearest memory is his homerun launched deep into the night, as the first batter from the Red Sox to step to the plate in the game. You can see by watching the clip that he really had to put his all into his swing to get the ball out of the park.
But it wasn’t just a swing to hit homeruns, he put everything into every swing he took. Here’s a look at his hits from the postseason six years later, where the Red Sox took home their third Championship since the start of the 2004 season.
Something about the swing makes it look like a kid swinging his older brother’s bat, or a slightly older kid swinging his dad’s bat. But it was effective! And that’s all that matters.
After taking home the World Series trophy in 2007—along with Rookie of the Year—he followed up an incredible freshman season with an even better second year. This is definitely not a typical early career arc for any player, let alone the best. Often, when a young player comes up and sets the league on fire, it’s because pitchers haven’t faced him enough to know what he isn’t good at hitting. After his first year, there is a huge data set of any given player’s approach, and from that data set, teams will form their gameplan against him for the next year. For that reason, players that start their careers hot often have a lackluster year two (as well as some level of regression to the mean). In his second full year in MLB, Pedroia put up 7 WAR, leading the league in runs, hits, and doubles. That season marked his first All Star Game, Gold Glove Award, Silver Slugger Award, and an MVP. Through two years, Pedroia’s trophy case was nearly full.
Over the next seven and a half years, Pedroia added three more All Star appearances, three more Gold Glove Awards, and two top-10 MVP finishes. His 2011 season, the best of his career, came with a 9th place MVP finish due mostly to Justin Verlander’s absurd year and being slightly out-shone by teammate Jacoby Ellsbury.
I loved watching Pedroia, or “Petey”, bat because it was a funny thing to watch. But I loved watching him field because he was baffling. He got to balls that it didn’t seem like he had any reason to. Diving to his left and right, he was simply elite. But it always looked… how do I say this? Not ugly, but certainly not graceful either.
One play in particular has always been my favorite though, and to understand that one, we should take a look at what is arguably the most famous baseball play in the history of the game—for almost no reason. I also have to apologize to my dad for the next section. Dad, you aren’t going to like this and you can skip the next two paragraphs. The play, nicknamed “The Flip”, comes from the defensive “genius” of MLB legend Derek Jeter. Look, I can already hear the Yankees fans coming at me for that characterization, every defensive metric hates him, he was a bad fielder. If you want to make an argument that he was a good defensive shortstop, I’m all ears, but if it starts with how pretty it looked, you are wrong. The Flip is a play that is spoken about with deep reverence in baseball parlance, the play comes from the 2001 Playoffs, on October 13th. A base hit down the line looks like it will erase the Yankees’ 1-0 lead over the Athletics, especially when the throw from right field misses the cut-off man, waiting to relay the throw to home—done to improve accuracy and make up for the distance that the right fielder cannot throw the ball—but running down to the bouncing ball is Derek Jeter, nowhere near where you would expect a shortstop to be, who cuts the ball off and flips it to the catcher who tags the runner out at home.
I have two issues with this play:
I’m pretty sure the ball would have gotten to the Yankees catcher without Derek Jeter’s intervention.
Jeremy Giambi, the runner trying to score for the A’s, was safe at home. The Yankees’ catcher missed the tag.
Yankees fans are going to butcher me for that, but I speak the truth here at A Blog About Baseball.
Now let’s get back to that play by Dustin Pedroia. In the final inning of a tie game against the Texas Rangers, Carlos Gomez (a favorite of mine from the era) taps a ground ball to the Red Sox’s third baseman. It’s a slow roller, and Gomez has some speed, so it’s going to be a close play at first. The third baseman barehands the ball and comes up throwing. His throw is too far back into the runner for Mitch Moreland, the first baseman, to make a play on it. (Side Note: I remember Mitch Moreland being very good for the Red Sox, but I just looked at his stats and, it turns out, he wasn’t very good anywhere he played.) The ball ricochets off of the wall in foul territory, and Pedroia finds some wizardry of his own, barehanding the overthrow while sprawling out in shallow right field to orient himself just so, allowing him to throw the ball back to Moreland and retire Gomez. It’s better to just watch it:
I mean, that is everything that you would hope to see out of your franchise player. Unlike Jeter, he was exactly where he was supposed to be: backing up the throw to first. Unlike Jeter, there’s literally no way that Mitch Moreland could have gotten to that ball without Pedroia’s intervention. Unlike Jeter’s play, Gomez was out.
Want some more tie-game Petey highlights? Well if you’re still reading this, my assumption is that you do. Well, here, the Red Sox are tied in extra innings with the Los Angeles Angels. David Ortiz is at the plate, and the infield is shifted to cover the right side of the infield—because Ortiz was a dead pull hitter (he hit most of the balls he put in play to right field), just take a look at his spray chart from 2016 if you don’t believe me. You can see that he did almost all of his damage to right field:
Anyway, Ortiz was one of the most dangerous hitters in the game, and with the game on the line, there really aren’t many players you would rather have up at bat. But, Pedroia is standing on first base. Ortiz’s at-bat would be worth a lot more to the Red Sox if Pedroia was in scoring position (on second or third base). Pedroia wasn’t the fastest guy in the league by any stretch of the imagination, but he was quick and very smart. On this pitch, he steals second base cleanly. He then looks up, realizes that the shift has taken the third baseman far from the bag, and he just takes off, stealing third as well.
If you asked me to describe any player’s career in one play, I would have a tough time. Baseball is a complex and nuanced sport, to be successful, you need to be good at so many things that one play is unlikely to showcase the kind of player you are. The video above, however, perfectly summarizes Dustin Pedroia and his career. He wasn’t the biggest, or the strongest, or the fastest player on the field. But he was the physical embodiment of hustle and grit. I was never the biggest, or the strongest, or the fastest player on any team that I ever played on, but I always felt like I could make up for it by being as much like Dustin Pedroia as I could.
This blog is being published the day after the 2025 Hall of Fame Ballot is released. To make it to the Hall of Fame, players need 75% of the vote. To stay on the ballot for next year, they have to have at least 5%. Pedroia received 47 votes this year, good for 11.9% in his first year of eligibility. It’s not even remotely close enough to consider him a contender next year, or probably the year after. But it guarantees that next year, we’ll all have reason to revisit his career accomplishments again. And that makes me extraordinarily happy. Pedroia was a special player, not just to me and the legions of Red Sox fans, but for everyone who has ever enjoyed the game. He was an exceptionally firey player with an incredible amount of heart and determination. He was also excellent at baseball.
Pedroia retired with 51.9 career WAR, short of the heuristic 60 that often leads to enshrinement, but he accumulated the vast majority of that production before he turned 30. If you look only at post-integration second basemen (which you should, pre-integration statistics are dumb considering players were not playing against the best competition, just the best white competition) then Pedroia is the 12th best second baseman. Through his age 32 season—the last that saw a productive Petey—he was good for 49.9 WAR, 9th best. One can make a compelling statistical argument for Pedroia as a Hall of Famer, and so I will.
There are 16 players who played at least 75% of their games at second base that are currently enshrined in the Hall of Fame. Pedroia has a higher WAR than six of them. He also won the Rookie of the Year, MVP, a Silver Slugger Award, 4 Gold Gloves, a Wilson Defensive Player of the Year Award, and two World Series Rings (or three if you count 2018, but he only played 3 games all year, so…). That’s a pretty loaded trophy cabinet for someone who is going to miss out on the Hall.
Recently, one of my favorite real baseball authors, Michael Baumann, wrote a piece called In Defense of the Hall of Very Good, and it was essentially a similar piece to this but about his favorite player, Jimmy Rollins. Another short guy with exceptional baseball talent, Rollins and Pedroia were contemporaries for much of their respective peaks. Pedroia is closer to the positional requirements of a Hall of Famer than Rollins, who played shortstop, but both seem to fall a tier below induction. Baumann is excellent, I love everything he writes, and I am about to quote him liberally to describe how I feel about Pedroia:
“…while I consider the Hall of Fame to be the ultimate validator of general greatness, it’s borderline irrelevant when it comes to personal or even regional significance. And we don’t have to treat it as such, or to act like it’s a slap in the face if your favorite player (…) gets left out.” He goes on, “for players like Rollins (…) or Pedroia, it might be appropriate to name a stadium feature after a franchise legend, or let’s keep things simple: Retire their number.”
The Red Sox should make sure that no player ever wears 15 for their franchise again. Pedroia was a singularly brilliant player for them, bringing championships to Boston and creating baseball fans for life. For my entire youth baseball career (until high school and travel ball) I wore number 15 in honor of my favorite player. My dad made me a baseball nut, Pedroia make me a Red Sox nut. He is a franchise legend and probably would have been a Hall of Famer if not for injuries in his 30s. Boston destroyed a lot of fans’ rooting interest over the last few years (check my next piece for why) and it would mean a lot to a lot of people if they did offer this honor to Petey.
I do, however, disagree with Baumann. Rollins played until he was 37 and had four full seasons after his age 32 season. If Pedroia had had the opportunity to even be okay, say 3 WAR per year, for four more years, we’re talking about a Hall of Famer. And for that reason, I think Pedroia deserves to be enshrined. The injuries that cut his career short weren’t his fault, and it’s absurd that he will be punished for them. I’ve alluded to these injuries throughout the piece, and here I’ll address them. Though, it will be brief, to spare myself.
On April 21, 2017, Manny Machado slid—spikes up—into Dustin Pedroia’s surgically repaired left knee. Some say that it was an aggressive slide, but your host at A Blog About Baseball would call it a dirty slide. Going in spikes up can only mean that the intent was to injure.
Pedroia was quoted after saying:
“I remember when I got the first MRI after that play. A doctor said, ‘Hey man, you could ruin not only your career but the rest of your life with this injury. You tore all the cartilage off on your medial compartment on your femur and your tibia.’”
While he managed to play for most of the year in 2017, it was obvious to anyone who had watched him play that he didn’t look right. In the offseason, he underwent surgery to repair the damage done by Machado. Unfortunately, the doctor was right. Pedroia’s career was over after that season. Appearing in just 9 more games for Boston, Pedroia attempted multiple comebacks, but was never able to regain his playing health. Following a partial knee replacement in 2020—the second procedure that he got for the sake of day-to-day mobility instead of sports performance—he called it quits.
When asked about the play, Pedroia refused to blame Machado—though the author of this blog post places all of the blame on Machado—he instead said:
“That play could’ve happened my rookie year. When you play second base… like me, you hang on until the last possible second to get the ball because, you watched it: if there’s a slim chance at a double play, there’s one guy on planet Earth who could turn it. And you’re talking to him.”
There will only ever be one Dustin Pedroia. He was, and is, my favorite baseball player of all time. I loved watching him play and I’m glad that he will be on next year’s Hall of Fame ballot. I don’t think the writers will ever look on him as a deserving candidate, but I do hope that his number will be retired by the Red Sox. I also hope that, someday, the writers will see things my way, and put Pedroia where he belongs, in the Hall of Fame.
