Tue Sep 24, 2013 10:38 am
Sori does get poor jumps sometimes, and when he looks bad he looks really bad (although with the Yanks his effort has been good out there). I guess I just think there's a discrepancy between what is considered important for an outfielder and what really is. E.G. breaking back a step or two on bloops to the outfield will rarely cost you the play as a LF, because either the SS is there or it was hit sharply enough that you likely wouldn't have gotten there. Only a very small window of possible hits will actually cost you the play. Also for example, the other day I was at a game where he took a bad route back and looked completely silly on a ball he should've had, despite it being a play that many LFers are not fast enough to make. But my eyeball test seems to match the metrics such as UZR, which are considered accurate over 3 or more year periods: Soriano makes jaw-droppingly bad plays sometimes, but much more often he makes some fairly tough plays look easy, which in the end is more valuable for an outfielder.
As for Curtis, he's deteriorated significantly in every aspect of his game. His first few years, through his best year in 2007 when he hit .302, his defense was extremely good, gold glove good in fact. But it started to slip, and has been well below average every year since, excluding one anomaly in 2010. Interestingly, after 2008 his batting averages also tanked, and the 2nd half of 2010 and first half of '11 were the only stretches where it was a little higher. I believe the common factor is his vision, which the yankees expressed some concern about a couple of years ago. He now swings and misses at an absurd rate far higher than he used to, and he takes atrocious routes on fly balls very consistently. So yes, he looks like a totally different player than he used to be.
