Can we talk sports for a minute?

ESPN.com currently has an excerpt from the new book The Stark Truth: The Most Overrated and Underrated Players in Baseball History. It's written, of course, by ESPN's own Jayson Stark, whose name contains an unnecessary "Y". Y? Because it prevents his name from showing up along the X-axis of chronological charts everywhere, unlike all those regular-old Jasons. (JFMAMJJASOND)

Anyway, the excerpt they posted claims that Andruw Jones is the most overrated center fielder of all time. The meat of his argument is that Andruw (please don't pronounce it awn-drew) burst onto the scene in 1996, rose to something comparable to stardom around 1998-2002, and has been in decline ever since. Jayson goes on to cite various statistics that indicate his decline as both a hitter and a fielder.

I can't argue with statistics, but his argument fails to convince me on one key point: that Andruw is still overrated. In order to be overrated, the player's reputation has to far exceed his actual ability. I don't deny that his performance has generally declined over the last few years, although probably not as severely as Stark would argue -- but I think his reputation isn't what it once was either. He's gone from being thought of as "the best center fielder of the last 30 years, bar none" to being "a pretty strong candidate for Cooperstown, if he keeps it up for a few more years" -- all in all, not a bad place to be.

The true measure will come when he enters the free agent market in the fall.