Is Rollins’s Mouth Bigger Than His Performance?

• Mets 3-Phillies 1:

    What a shock. I was right yesterday morning about two strong pitching performances by John Maine and Oliver Perez eliminating the bitter aftertaste of the Mets loss on Tuesday night.
    As great a player as Jimmy Rollins is, he seems to talk a bit too much considering his average results this year and that the Phillies, even with their comeback last season, got blitzed in the NLDS in three straight games by the Rockies; and Rollins’s peformance in the series wasn’t Thurman Munson/1976 World Series heroic in a losing cause; he batted .182 with a triple and a homer in 11 at bats. Some guys need to flap their mouths constantly to motivate themselves, but Rollins hasn’t been very good this year and it’s quite likely that 2007 was his career year. After his gloating on Tuesday night, he went 1 for 4 last night and grounded into a fielder’s choice to end today’s game as the tying run at the plate.
    It’s one thing to back up one’s talk with results as Rollins did last year, but it’s getting to the point where the line from Top Gun may be apropos for Rollins: “<his> ego is writing checks his body can’t cash” and if he continues yapping without performance, there’s going to be a backlash around the league; if a player’s skills are diminishing, he doesn’t want to give his opponents more of an incentive to beat him and as Rollins ages, he may find that out in an increasingly realistic fashion as his numbers fall and his flapping mouth comes back to haunt him.