Bill Simmons Has a Good Memory, Part 2

I’m not going to go into Bill Simmons’ mailbag in a tremendous amount of detail, because FireJayMariotti beat me to it. But sometimes Bill likes to just selectively remember how shit went down in the past. He’s usually good at it, but sometimes he’s just way off. So off that even a quick read of his work makes me say, “what the fuck?”

So, Bill, what the fuck?

On the subject of Joe Borowski:

Can you win a World Series with a closer who makes the '96 John Wetteland look like Eric Gagne during his 84-save streak?

The implication, clearly, is that Borowski sucks so much he made a not-so-good closer look like Eric Gagne when Gagne was unreal. To me he has to be implying that Wetteland was not that good, or was even just average, because otherwise this makes no sense. You wouldn’t say, “he made Roger Clemens of ’97 look like Pedro Martinez of ’00!” That doesn’t make any sense.

John Wetteland:

1996 Regular Season: 63 innings, 69 K’s, 2.83 ERA, 179 ERA+.
1996 Playoffs: 12 1/3 innings, 15 K’s, 2.23 ERA, 7 saves, 4 World Series Saves, World Series MVP.

For what it's worth, he was also named Rolaids Reliever of the Decade for the 90’s. Yeah that guy sucked!