Did you click the video first? No? It's just a big black box? That's because the MLB Advanced Media department is staffed by gibbons, and they usually chew things when they should be writing code. You can find the video here. There should have been an F.P. warning in the headline, but at least there's one in this sentence.
I just spent the first part of the morning looking at Omar Vizquel highlights. They include descriptions like this:
Omar Vizquel brings home Brian Horwitz on a sacrifice fly to deep center
Welcome to the offseason. Like, the real offseason. The part without anything of interest. Pull up a chair. It'll be a while. The search also led to this:
… which is glorious. But the point of the search was that I'm tired of qualifying Brandon Crawford's defense with "best since." I wanted to look at Vizquel -- just his time with the Giants, mind you, so Indians fans can discard that e-mail -- and see if he really was that good. Vizquel is the only Gold Glove shortstop in Giants history, you know. There should have been others like, oh, Brandon Crawford, but there's still a tendency to think of Vizquel as the gold standard. At least in the past 10 years.
And before that, it was Royce Clayton. The only highlight of Clayton on MLB.com is of him flying out to end the NLCS in 1996, so I don't have video evidence. And because it's Major League Baseball, this is the only thing on YouTube:
/bookmarks
So I can't remember how good Clayton really was. Neifi Perez was responsible for crop failure and rickets in his time with the Giants, but he was a pretty good defensive shortstop. And we can never forget Jose Uribe, who was an outstanding defender even though he was built like Jose Canseco.
If you go by the stats, Mike Benjamin was the best on a per-game basis. Huh. Didn't remember him being good. By those same metrics, Crawford is on a Vizquel/Clayton pace so far.
Long comment-starter short: How much more does Crawford have to do for us to drop the "best since" label? Another season at the same level? Does he need to get even better? Become as good as Jimmy Rollins so he can win a Gold Glove? Because I'm thinking of dropping the "best since" label, but I need to make sure it adheres to the groupthink.