Placido Polanco Wins Gold Glove as Phillies Continue to Have Offseason
By Justin Klugh
All those times this year when Placido Polanco was spearing a line drive out of swirling gale force wins, or filching a base hit, braking hard in foul territory, and sending it across the infield before the ball even realizes it’s been struck by a bat, was he imagining being handed that sweet Gold Glove at the end of the season? Of course not. Polly is a team player, one who is so unsung he doesn’t even sing in the shower.
Its just nice to know that he’d be in the top ten of “Players Who Send Hitters Back to the Dugout About to Hurl Their Helmet in Disgust.”
Gold Gloves, though. They kind of lost some steam last year when Derek Jeter got one for legacy purposes. Which, when you start doing that with any award, kind of subtracts from the legitimacy when it is given to other people in the future. Like when they gave Derek Jeter the Nobel Peace Prize for Handsomeness. I mean what even is that. And did they even receive my headshots? The mail delivery in this country, I’m telling you–its to blame for 90% of my problems.
But the win here isn’t meant to outweigh the painful… anything else that has happened. I mean its not like the Phillies have made a habit of being handed trophies this offseason, so should we overvalue the importance of this individual award or shrug it off and play it cool like everyone else? God damn it, everyone else is so cool. Its not fair.
Polly played a graphically pleasing year in the hot corner, very rarely screwing things up irreversibly. His hitting suffered at the first two months of the season, but the Gold Glove has nothing to do with that and besides, they give out the Silver Sluggers tomorrow. Polly will not be receiving one.
But will this acknowledgement of his dominance be enough to indicate an improvement at third isn’t a priority? I tried to write that sentence in a way that seemed like it was a credible argument, but based on the amount of needles being injected into our 36-year-old third baseman, and my extremely recent doubtful claims on the legitimacy of the Gold Glove as an award, we shouldn’t be debating this.
Congratulations, Polly! At least you weren’t Shane Victorino and beaten out of your Gold Glove by a monster young phenom or Carlos Ruiz and beaten out of it by a guy with a bunch of neck tattoos.