ESPN — Pablo Sandoval says he isn’t proud of what he has become over the past two years and insists he is ready to make the most of the second chance he’s about to receive.
In a joint English-Spanish interview with ESPN.com and ESPN Deportes, Sandoval said he got “complacent” after signing a five-year, $95 million contract with the Boston Red Sox in November 2014 and pledged to “start my baseball career all over again” now that he is fully recovered from left shoulder surgery.
“My career had fallen into an abyss because I was so complacent with things that I had already accomplished,” Sandoval said by phone in his first public comments since August. “I did not work hard in order to achieve more and to remain at the level of the player that I am and that I can be.”
Look, I’ll be honest with you; when this season abruptly ended and my first thoughts towards 2017 surfaced, Pablo Sandoval was not a part of them. I declared myself #done with this guy last April and I’ve had no intention on backing down from that. We overpaid him to start, then he got fat and lazy and played like crap and then missed an entire season. That a guy you want on your roster? No thank you. But I understand that trading him certainly isn’t an option, since his value right now would be so low, and I get that even though salary doesn’t dictate anything, you’re not gonna take a guy who you owe over $50 million to and throw him to the curb. The Sox obviously saw something in Pablo that made them pull the trigger on 5 years, $95 million, and they’re hoping it resurfaces. We all are.
Now that Travis Shaw is a Brewer, Boston’s 3rd base position is wide open for Sandoval to swoop in. Which is probably good, because we all know what happened last year when Pablo had a little competition for his spot. You can see in the image above that Sandoval has clearly lost weight, and now today’s ESPN piece shows something we really haven’t seen a lot of from Pablo; humility and regret. He seems to at least feel a little bad for what he’s put Sox fans through for the past two years, and he seems determined to turn his legacy around in 2017.
Now, a lot has contributed to Sandoval’s weight problems. He would rapidly fluctuate weights in San Francisco, and since he’s come to Boston we’ve heard about stress, eating disorders, the whole nine. But what matters now is that he cares; cares enough about Boston, the Red Sox, and his own career, to turn it around. Obviously Sandoval was a top-5 third basemen during his Giants days, and he’s still only 29 years old; this isn’t an impossible task we’re talking about here. I’m not getting my hopes up too much yet, but we could be well on our way to a brand new Pablo Sandoval era here in Boston. But I’ll believe it when I see it.
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