Wait, how different do you think baseball stats are now vs. 11 years ago? The smarter baseball fans are in tune with sabermetrics at places like Northside Baseball. Nomar was a pretty bad player in 2004 before he got traded to Chicago (-0.1 WAR lol), I guarantee you the reaction would be completely different had it happened now compared to 11 years ago. BP and BR were already around and well established at that point; it's not like it wasn't obvious he was coming back from an injury. He had also shown, just the year before, that when he wasn't injured he was one of the most valuable players in the game. I mainly remember people talking about OBP/OPS on here. Folks weren't talking much about defensive metrics or park adjusted stats, etc. A lot of that stuff existed but not on free Internet sites at the time.