BleacherReport recently caught up with the newly acquired 3B for the Red Sox, and it sounds as though he isn’t having any second guesses about leaving San Francisco.
Leaving the Giants?
“Not hard at all,” Pablo Sandoval told Bleacher Report during an early-morning conversation here the other day. “If you want me around, you make the effort to push and get me back.”
The Giants did not make that effort, Sandoval said, reiterating that last spring’s aborted talks for a contract extension in San Francisco were pretty much the end of the line.
“I knew early in spring training last year I was going to leave,” Sandoval said. “They didn’t respect my agent. Contract talks, everything. The way Brian Sabean (Giants general manager) talked to my agent.”
From there, Sandoval said, he did his best to soak in everything during the rest of the season, making the most out of what he knew would be his last summer in a Giants uniform.
He kept business off the field, playing in 157 games, batting .279/.324/.415 with 16 homers and 73 RBI (including posting a .308 average and .799 OPS from May 11 through season’s end) and, of course, playing the hero again in October in front of thousands of worshipping Panda masks with an MLB-record 26 postseason hits.
All of this explains, he says, why he rebuffed the Giants’ late charge to keep him in November. By then, he says, it was too late. Even with October echoes still fresh in the air.
“The Giants made a good offer, but I didn’t want to take it,” he said. “I got five years (and $95 million) from Boston. I left money on the table in San Francisco.
“It is not about money. It is about how you treat the player.”
It’s interesting that Pablo had decided he was going to leave even before the start of last season. He sounds a lot like David Oritz when he begins speaking on how players are treated, as Red Sox fans have always heard Big Papi’s demands for “respect” around the league. It makes sense that once negotiations went awry in SF, Pablo began to take notice of other organizations treating their Championship winning players like royalty, and decided he wanted in.
Anyway, these quotes are sure to hurt if you’re a Giants fan, but take solace in the fact that nobody can take away those 3 World Series rings he helped you win.
Ps. I wonder if those people who booed the Red Sox scout in a Bay Area church would have done it if they had known Pablo was leaving one way or another…