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Joe Mauer: Selfish Prick?

You know I have a soft spot in my heart for catchers. I also love ridiculous journalism. So when Aaron Gleeman directed his followers to "[e]asily the worst column you'll read today", I was all over it.

Yeah - he wasn't kidding.

In the article, St. Cloud Times sports editor Dave DeLand proclaimed this years Rangers/Cardinals World Series a "World Series for the everyman", noting that "big money teams" like the Yankees and Phillies did not make the World Series despite massive spending, and better yet, the teams with the third through ninth largest payrolls didn't even make the playoffs! Spending money is BAD, people!

First off, even with the wild card, baseball doesn't take a whole lot of teams into the playoffs. This isn't hockey. So every season, at least two of the top ten payrolls in baseball will fail to make the playoffs. In this season's case, three of the top ten made it; the Yankees (#1), the Phillies (#2), and the Tigers (#10), with three more finishing only a few games out of playoff contention, so I'm not really sure what we're getting at here. I guess we should hate teams that spend money because they're the enemy. So be it. That argument gets recycled every year.

OK, so that said - how did this become the "everyman series"? The Cardinals have the 11th highest payroll in baseball, with the Rangers ranking 13th. This argument works if Tampa Bay (#29) was facing off against Arizona (#25). The Rangers have 17 players on their payroll making at least $1 million (some of which don't even play for them, or in one case actually play for the other team), while the Cardinals have four players who make at least $12 million this season alone (Matt Holliday, Albert Pujols, Chris Carpenter, and... wait, Kyle Lohse?) Both teams actively go after players in free agency (Adrian Beltre for Texas, Lance Berkman for St. Louis this past offseason), and take on salary dumps and players expected to leave via free agency (Mike Napoli, Holliday, Jake Westbrook, Ryan Theriot). These aren't exactly scrappy rags-to-riches franchises. If anything, Texas goes against that argument, going from 27th to 13th in MLB in salary this season.

Yet, that's not the thing that made this column so ridiculous. It was DeLand using Minnesota Twins catcher Joe Mauer as an example of - well, I'm not sure exactly - in comparison to Nick Punto, a former Twin currently playing for the Cardinals.

Punto is a short, squatty, 33-year-old utility infielder with a predilection for sliding headfirst into first base.

Mauer is a tall, elegant, 28-year-old All-Star catcher with three batting titles and an impressive portfolio of television commercials.

Punto has no particular skill as an offensive player, just a willingness to play anywhere and do anything that would benefit the team. But the Twins cut him loose after the 2010 season: They could no longer justify his $4 million salary, since they had to scrape together $184 million to give to Mauer.

So, Punto signed for $750,000 with St. Louis, where he pretty much continued to be Nick Punto: contributing with his glove, playing anywhere, doing anything, and doing it all with boundless intensity and enthusiasm.

And while the $184 Million Man who couldn’t be bothered to play with a head cold this season sat at home, the Everyman who took an 81 percent pay cut this year helped the Cardinals upset first the Phillies and then the Brewers.

On Sunday, Punto’s sacrifice fly brought home the seventh St. Louis run, the one that proved to be the deciding tally in the League Championship Series-clinching victory in Milwaukee. Mauer was elsewhere, perhaps practicing his lines for his next Head ‘N’ Shoulders spot.

Punto had three RBI in the LCS, which is three more LCS RBI than Mauer has accumulated in his lucrative career.

And on Wednesday night, Punto was in uniform for Game 1 of the World Series. Mauer’s only World Series involvement will be in those incessant Gatorade commercials, the ones that show him sweating it out on the baseball field — presumably, before the bilateral leg weakness and head cold.

I'm not here to rip Nick Punto. The guy does his job - he plays all over the infield, plays good defense, and doesn't kick kittens or anything. Hitting baseballs is not his strong point, but even DeLand admits that. Whether or not he was worth $4 million a season is debatable (actually, Punto's Twins contract had a team option for 2011 for $5 million, not $4 million, with a $500k buyout, so the Twins saved $4.5 million declining the option), but the reality is that if the Twins had kept Punto, his $5 million salary would have been tied for ninth on the team - pretty steep for a 33-year-old who "has no particular skill as an offensive player."

No, it's the ripping of Mauer that took me by surprise. Mauer, who five years ago was proclaimed a "hometown hero" by Sports Illustrated, and just two years ago was a Sports Illustrated cover boy again in his chase for .400. If anything, I always saw Mauer as heading toward the same type of career as Cal Ripken did for Baltimore and Derek Jeter did for New York - playing his entire career with the same team, never really coming across any real negativity, except for the occasional frustration during slumps and pressure towards the end of his career when age has caught up to him to step aside and to take a lesser role. Sure, there's be the occasional negative column from a rival city's paper in the heat of battle, but there'd always be the underlying respect begrudgingly bestowed upon him with so few players.

But not in your own home state, especially one like Minnesota. New York, sure - they're the muckrakers. But in St. Cloud, Minnesota - population 65,842 - the editor of the St. Cloud Times decided that he was going to make an example out of Joe Mauer. In doing so, he broke down the 2009 AL MVP, 4-time all-star, and three-time Gold Glove winner into a selfish, lazy, primadonna who would rather sit at home with minor maladies or film another commercial than play winning playoff baseball.

I get it - local media is frustrated that the Twins had a horrible season. That's understandable. But to blame the whole thing on Mauer - or more realistically Mauer's contract - is reckless. Mauer, to his credit, doesn't seem to let any of the criticism bother him, at least publicly, but he has to realize that he'll be hearing this through 2018, when his contract ends. The moment he signed his contract, he went from being a "hometown hero" to essentially a Yankee playing in different colored pinstripes, and that any choice he makes in the future that making $750k was right will be wrong making $23 million.