But this is one of them: every time a Sports Illustrated columnist declares a 16-year-old kid to be Roy freaking Hobbs, I have to get off my ass and blog about it. (Sorry for the two-week vacation. It's summer and I'm 19, for crying out loud! But still, sorry.)
Anyway, here's the guy who will be suiting up for the Hebrew Oilers any day now:
http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1156215/index.htm
Anything he wants to hit he hits! Anything he wants to do he does!
I'm as wide-eyed as anyone when it comes to statements like "ZOMG This 16-year-old could hit circles around Babe Ruth OMFG!!!!!!"; hell, when Matt Kemp hit 7 homers in his first 15 games as a Dodger in 2006 I figured him to be Albert Pujols Lite for the next 18 years (and we all know how that turned out). Sure, it's not at all normal for a kid to hit 500-foot homers before he can legally get into an R-rated movie, but for once could we tone down the hoopla? Josh Hamilton was an incredible high school athlete with an enormous amount of hype, and the resulting pressure weighed on him so much that he became an alcoholic and a drug addict. At least the mainstream media learned nothing from that whole saga. Good job boys.
In reality, there's so much that could go wrong for this kid on his way to the top (injuries, mental problems, Barbara Hershey stalking him and then gunning him down in a hotel room, etc) that it's completely dumb and ignorant to proclaim him a "baseball savior" at age 16. Until he strikes out The Whammer or hits the cover off the ball, color me unconvinced. (But still a little excited at the same time.)
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