So. Cody Ross is your new number 7. And JD Drew, rumored to be retiring, gets to wake up every morning, look himself in the mirror and say, “Man, I can buy anything I want today.”
For a quiet guy, Drew was perhaps one of the most polarizing players to wear the red hose over the past 10 years (with the possible exception of the notorious Bry Nelson). Folks either derided him for playing the game with all the intensity of a guy picking up a couple loaves of bread at the corner bakery, or swooned for his “numbers” that made him “the kind of player” only “smart baseball fans” can truly “know how to love.”
Myself, I’ll remember him as a good guy who never whined, kept his focus on the game, endured some personal issues that I’ll always give him a mulligan for, and managed to get overpaid–if such a concept even exists anymore in Major League Baseball–for some fairly decent years. Which clearly makes him the smarter fellow (even though his salary looks like a busboy tip compared to what Carl Crawford will have banked when all is said and done). But he did put the nail in the Cleveland Indians’ coffin in the 2007 ALCS, which I still argue would have made Drew as huge a figure in Red Sox lore as Dave Roberts if 2004 never happened. You follow me?
It was the biggest home run of his tenure in Boston and, in my opinion, worth every penny we paid him. What say you?
