Only 24 years old, Pedroia's already got the hairline of Rudy Giuliani. He's going to look 40 before he hits 30.
Then there's the swing. Pedroia swings the bat like a blindfolded 6-year-old trying to bust a piñata. He swings the bat harder than Vlad Guerrero. Yet he almost never swings and misses and rarely strikes out. He just gets hits. Bundles of base hits.
Pedroia's summer Hit Tour Across America moved to the Pacific Northwest last night as the Red Sox opened a three-game series at Safeco Field against the Mariners.
Boston's diminutive Hit Doctor is batting .320 (third in the American League) with 132 hits. He's hit safely in 23 of his last 24 games, batting .444 with 5 homers, 13 doubles, 18 RBIs, and 29 runs in his last 31 games. He leads the league with 41 multiple-hit games, and had his run of five straight multihit games broken last night. With a first-inning single against Mariners starter Jarrod Washburn, he's hit in 22 straight road games.
Everything about him flies in the face of everything we thought we knew. Count me among those who believed Pedroia would not be able to succeed at the big league level. Now I'm beginning to think he might be the greatest hitter in the history of baseball.
Remember when "Seinfeld's" George Costanza was hired by the Yankees? There's a hilarious scene in which Jerry and George cite all the Pinstripe greats, a routine that goes something like, "Ruth . . . Gehrig . . . DiMaggio . . . Mantle . . . Costanza."
Now we have the greatest hitters of all time, "Cobb . . . Hornsby . . . Williams . . . Aaron . . . Mays . . . Pedroia."
Theo Epstein and his minions get tons of credit on this one. Not many organizations would have taken a chance on such an unusual prospect.
Sure, Pedroia excelled at the highest level of NCAA baseball (.384 in three seasons at Arizona State), but it would have been easy to dismiss him as a nice little college player with stats artificially inflated by aluminum bats.
No. The Sox saw the potential for greatness at the big league level. And now they are being rewarded.
