I heard national baseball scribe Jeff Passan on Brock and Salk this morning talking about the over-the-top anger about the M’s optioning Guillermo Heredia in order to keep Ichiro. I’m paraphrasing here, but Passan’s point was that this anger isn’t really related to the case at hand – the delta in performance over a 10-20 day period between two non-starting OFs – but had been building up for some time, and this was just an excuse to let it out.
I think this is clearly true, and while Heredia’s had a great start, he wasn’t going to play a whole lot over the next couple of series.