#1) Criticizing Revere for his shortcomings, or pointing out where the stats show the holes in his game is not "hate". I'm sick of "why does everyone hate X?" coming up whenever people are critical of a player. Hatred would be irrational. Hatred wouldn't come with evidence. Hatred wouldn't be metered out in well-spoken, properly constructed arguments with cited supporting facts. Hatred would be "OMG Ben Revere doesn't belong on this team because he's awful!" and would respond to challenges with "He's awful. Look at him. I don't need to explain why he sucks so much."
#2) As I have said in prior posts on the matter, Revere's problem is that he is one-dimensional. Or kinda one-half dimensional.
If you look at the 36 regular players who hit .290 or better in 2015, here is where Revere ranks:
OBP: 29th
wRC+: 34th
wOBA: 35th
WAR: 32nd
BB%: 27th
2Bs: 31st
Hard contact %: 34th
GB rate: 4th
Infield Hit %: 5th
Translation: Ben Revere does not get on base, get extra-base hits, generate significant offence in any type of dimension, provide a high level of overall on-field value. What he does do is make contact with the ball, slap it on the ground and reach 1st base because of it. That's basically it. If not for his speed, his average would suffer terribly because he would no longer beat out those bleeders and choppers towards infielders. And for all the talk of the damage his speed does on the basepaths, he never really stole all that much while a Blue Jay anyway.
Also for reference, I recall a lot of people who strongly opposed the idea of Kevin Pillar as a leadoff hitter. And almost everyone, even myself, routinely cracked jokes about Pillar's striking inability/unwillingness to take a walk. Pillar had an OBP that was only 10 points lower than Revere's. I'm not saying that makes Pillar a good leadoff man, but in terms of doing what a leadoff man is expected to do (get on base to provide a runner to be driven in by the next few hitters), the gap between Kevin Pillar and Ben Revere is not nearly as wide as it might intuitively seem.
Finally, let's just look at Revere vs the rest of the Blue Jays. Setting the bar at 100 PAs (just enough to weed out pitchers and cup-of-coffee players from factoring in here, but not enough to remove things like season-long part timers such as Navarro, or in-season acquired regulars like Tulo), Revere's career .328 OBP would've ranked ahead of the following Jays:
Carrera
Goins
Pillar
Navarro
Smoak
Tulo was in there too, but just like I'm using Revere's career OBP to factor out what was more than likely a hot-streak-fuelled .354 OBP in his Jays time, I'm also willing to bet that Tulowitzki's .319 OBP in his Jays career is less "real" than the closer-to-.370 OBP he has shown over the entire rest of his career. For what it's worth, Pillar, Navarro, and Smoak's #s are more fairly in line with their career norms. Carrera's was a bit high, but there's still sample size issues with him. And Goins, it was waaaay high, but the validity of the newer # depends on whether you believe that whatever changes he made to his approach/swing late in the season are something he can keep up, or if it was a hot streak and he's going to slide back toward his old self when next season rolls around.
the tl;dr version is this:
Ben Revere, player profile:
Contact hitter: Good
Getting on base: Pretty Bad
Power/extra-base hitting: Really Bad
Defence: Acceptable
Arm: Awful
Speed: Great, but he doesn't use it as much as you'd expect/hope
This is not hate. This is not trashing Revere. This is objectively looking at what he is. And that is a guy who can hit the ball with the bat and play ok defence because his speed bails out some questionable defensive decision making. But it is also a guy that does shockingly little with that skill of having ball meet bat because most of the time those balls are on the ground or are little bleeder singles. He doesn't need to be a doubles/HR machine. But even though people will say that too much importance is being placed on a walk and espouse a belief that there are people who think walk>hit (which is not true, either in the sense of that comparison or that there are individuals who believe such a thing), a walk pretty much equals a hit if that hit is a weak, dribbly groundball single.
