From the title of this post, you're probably guessing that I'm going to spend the entire thing hating on Emilio Bonifacio. Not true. I'm only going to spend half of the post hating on him, if even that much.
This guy has spent the past two years getting passed around the league like a case of herpes at the University of South Carolina and is about equally as physically attractive. He strikes out twice as much as he walks, and prior to this season had stolen all of 7 bases in almost 200 major league at-bats...out of 12 attempts! His career on-base percentage was exactly .300 coming into 2009.
There's a funny phenomenon in psychology called the anchoring heuristic, where your initial information becomes the "anchor" and is subsequently very difficult to change. It's why first impressions are so important. If Bonifacio started out hitting .150 the first couple of weeks and then hit .471 or whatever at the end of the season, nobody would bat an eyelash. He's a .150 hitter who had one fluke week, right? Well when he hits .150 next week, you'll be tempted to think of that as the fluke, when the fluke was really last week. He was just fortunate to have his best week of the season happen to come at the very beginning.
But whatever. I don't look down on anyone who grabbed him. Life is a game of risk and reward, and who knows? But let's not forget the lesson of Chris Shelton in 2006. The odds aren't in your favor.
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