I got a cool new DVD, "City of Champions: The Best of Boston Sports." Tons of clips of great Boston sports moments.
In one part, they show Boston players who left Boston, via trades or free agency. They showed Nomar Garciaparra, Ray Bourque, Carlton Fisk, Curtis Martin, Bill Parcells (not a player, but still), Roger Clemens, Wade Boggs, Babe Ruth, Drew Bledsoe, Lawyer Milloy, Pedro Martinez, Phil Esposito, and Sparky Lyle.
Apart from Nomar and Carlton (who both went to Chicago) and Ray (who is a completely different story than the rest), what do the others all have in common?
Every single one of them went to New York. (Not necessarily the city, of course.)
They also showed Johnny Damon talking about Nomar leaving, and now even he is in New York.
Re:why?
pudge on 2005-12-27T19:18:00
There are four reasons.
One is as you say: money. Boston -- especially in baseball -- pays its players pretty well, and there are not many more places to go, to go up. This was the case with Johnny Damon, for example.
Two is stupidity, such as with the transactions involving Sparky Lyle (a 70s-era pitcher) and Babe Ruth, and the letting go of Clemens.
Three is dumb luck/coincidence, such as with Bledsoe and Milloy to Buffalo (and Buffalo is a different market anyway, so that barely counts). Also Pedro, Esposito... that they went to NY teams had little to do with the fact that they were NY teams, it was just who got them.
This is similar to the "stupidity" category, except that we don't normally consider these transactions to be terribly bad ones. Sure, Bledsoe was good, but not as good as Brady; Milloy was a bad decision in retrospect because we could have used him, but OTOH, we won Super Bowls both years since we've let him go, so it can't have been too bad. Esposito was a great player we all loved, but we got Jean Ratelle and Brad Park, who were pretty great. And Pedro: he is still great, but few think he will continue to be so in three years or so (then again, we thought the same thing with Clemens, and four Cy Young awards later...).
Four is spite: New York teams -- especially the Yankees -- like to take players from Boston teams. I suppose a little of this may have been involved in the Parcells/Martin deals.
Re:You think new york's the problem?
pudge on 2005-12-28T18:53:43
<bill o'reilly>CUT HIS MIKE!</bill o'reilly>
