Best Player Ever: Matt Stairs Retires

Your Uncle Matt.

Reading through a Joe Posnanski article (read him, then you'll know nothing I do is original), I found this stat line:

.262/.356/.490
.262/.356/.477

The top is Reggie Jackson's career line, the bottom Matt Stairs'.  It seems a bit ridiculous to look at that and realize just how close some of their overall stats were if you eliminated the 6000 more at-bats that Reggie had.  Matt Stairs, of all people, has numbers like a historically great power hitter.  If you really think about it, though, why not?  The man swung for the fences literally every single time he came up to the plate, and, despite a diet of beer and more beer, he had a lot of power in him.



Of course, I don't want to go off and think what might have been or lambaste teams for never giving him a chance.  Instead, this is a chance to celebrate a guy that, the more and more he aged, the more and more I began to like him.  The guy was hilarious, a sort of Heath Bell character, or rather Heath Bell is a sort of Matt Stairs character.  Rarely has any player so wholeheartedly and excitedly embraced his role as a big power pinch hitter, despite the fact that Matt Stairs could have easily been much more (his career ISO was .01 points higher than Edgar Martinez's.)  Matt Stairs sat around, drank beer, acted Canadian, and then swung as hard as any person possibly could at really every fastball that was thrown.  If it wasn't a fastball, Stairs just stood there.

If you really think about it, there may have never been a baseball player so easy to understand, and yet it took GMs years to figure him out.  Matt Stairs hits for power (he had the same career SLG as Luis Gonzalez.)  End of discussion.  There was never a question about "will he be a good defender" or "will he steal bases?"  He won't.  He will hit for power, that is all.  Matt Stairs knew it, and there was no way in hell he was going to stop doing it unless he had to (he had the same career OBP as Shawn Green.)  Simply put, Matt Stairs was one of the great characters in all of baseball and will be sorely missed, never to be replaced, a relic of what every American likes to think Canadians are like.