Alfonso Soriano: Whiny-Ass Titty-Baby*

Smirking, overrated, defensive clusterfuck Alfonso Soriano has a problem playing the outfield:

"I don't want to change," Soriano said Monday night at a dinner held for major league players by Dominican Republic President Leonel Fernandez. "If I haven't done it before, I won't do it now."
Soriano said he had a greater comfort level in the AL, and he plans to become a free agent after next season and sign with an AL team.

"I knew the pitchers and batters of opposing teams and, therefore, where to place myself defensively. In the National that's going to take me a while," he said.

It's not like knowing how to place himself defensively actually helped him in any way comprehensible to man when he was in the AL; he is one of the worst defensive middle infielders in all of baseball. In his five years of playing second base, he had more balls bounce off his body than Jake Gyllenhall in Brokeback Mountain. Every defensive metric shows that Soriano is a God-awful liability at second base.

I think this talk of "adjustment" that he'll have to go through is more of a pre-emptive excuse for why Soriano's numbers will suck next year, when he moves from Arlington, the Coors Field of the AL which helped mask his offensive deficiencies, to the cavernous RFK in Washington, which will exacerbate them. That explains the unwillingness to play a corner outfield position, too. Deep down, he knows he sucks, and he's scared shitless of losing his value in his free agency walk year. He's a lot smarter than the idiotic GM of the Nationals, Jim Bowden, who actually wants to take his immobile ass and plunk him into the gigantic outfield of RFK Stadium.

Playing right field would put even his inflated Texas numbers below the league average; doing it in a pitchers' park would make him one of the worst-hitting outfielders in baseball. He wants to stay at second so that he can remain one of the top three or four second basemen in the league and sneak into another All-Star game (it's a shitty crop) and continue overinflating his worth in the yearbefore he hits paydirt.

The icing on the cake is the fact that he proudly declared his free agency for 2007 in December 2005. That is the ultimate in balls, hanging his team out to dry, and giving fans another reason not to get excited about what is likely to be a shit team. "I don't really care about Washington and I am going to leave at my first opportunity." Nice PR job, a-hole.

*(Titty-baby insult stolen from Atrios.)