Aww, Ibanez Named One of the Nicest in Baseball

Raul Ibanez is very old and can’t hit very well anymore. But before you go demanding that he be thrown into a pen filled with starving wild boars (creative!), you should know that his colleagues in Major League Baseball named him the second nicest player in the entire sport. Awwww. Here’s the email we got from Sports Illustrated this morning:

In this week’s Sports Illustrated poll, 290 MLB players were asked, “Who is the nicest player in baseball?” Most players selected the Minnesota Twins’ DH Jim Thome (21 percent), followed by the Philadelphia Phillies OF Raul Ibanez (7 percent), Tampa Bay Rays’ DH Johnny Damon (5 percent), retired MLB 1B Mike Sweeney (5 percent) and the Minnesota Twins’ C Joe Mauer (4 percent).

Sports Illustrated also posed the question to its Facebook community. More than one quarter of fans selected Jim Thome (28 percent), followed by the New York Yankees’ SS Derek Jeter (17 percent) and the Boston Red Sox’s Dustin Pedroia (10 percent)
.

Now, don’t you feel bad for booing such a nice guy and wanting him locked in a cage with a gorilla in heat and shipped away to Morocco on a very large boat? No? Man, you are cold-blooded.

Anyway, I find these SI player polls hilarious because they’re so inherently meaningless, almost as meaningless as the magazine weekly Pop Culture Grid ("If I Were Britney, I Would (full in the blank for us, Landon Donovan"). You see that every player mentioned in the player poll is well over 30 years old, meaning they’ve been around the longest and met the largest number of teammates. So they essentially win this niceness prize thanks to longevity.

And the fan poll is even dumber. You don’t KNOW Jeter is a nice guy. All you know is what you see when he plays ball. Off the field, he could be a COLOSSAL bastard. But no, some idiot Yankee fan sees him play and is like, “Boy, he plays hard! I bet he’s really nice!”

Anyway, though Ibanez has had his issues at the plate, it’s comforting to know that the Phillies employ such a nice person. Then again, that’s probably why he can’t hit. He’s probably nice because he’s weak. AND WHAT’S A NICE PERSON DOING LIVING IN PHILADELPHIA?! BURN HIM! BURNNNN HIM!

Contact Us