I'm a terrible writer and this is old news, so I'm just going to bullet this out. (If anyone has a good baseball player & year analogy for where by blogging career is now at, I'd love to see it, but we all know it's some mediocrity nearing the end. Damn if only Joe Randa had played a few more years, I still think he retired too soon, but that's kinda what I'm thinking. He was a Padre, right?)
- So, to reiterate, everybody, including most of the commentariat, insisted that the Yuni was really just going to be a never playing non-entity. When we ran our "How Many PAs for Yuni?" poll in December, 12% of voters said he'd have less than 100 PAs, another 32% said he'd have between 101-175 and another 19% said 176-225. So that gets us to 53% predicting 225 PAs or fewer. And this was a defense of the Royals, mind you. That they brought in a player who they were going give 75 PAs to over six months for a cool $2 million.
- So leaving aside the "I told you so" and the hyperbole, we should probably try to find a model. Willie Bloomquist, in his Seattle days, was generally in the 220-260 range. (Then the Royals gave him 468 PAs in 2009. Cool.) Truly starting 3-4 times a week gets us well north of that, and probably over 300, if not higher. So can we have an honest discussion now? If we're going to defend having Yuni around, I think we need to be talking about 200 PAs, minimum. The Royals have made it perfectly clear: they want this guy around.
- So what is the most perfect scenario for you? Is it Betancourt playing over Moustakas? As Jeff noted in January, when you look at the data, this just makes no sense. Is it Betancourt providing Escobar's level of offense with a zillion times worse defense at SS? Or is it Betancourt hanging out at 2B and making us miss Getz/Gio? Oh, and we're talking about a bad SS who hasn't actually played these other positions? The mind absolutely boggles.
- Ultimately, these are all bad excuses to play a guy who just doesn't need to be around. Last season Yost just had stacks of lineup cards lying around pre-printed so he didn't have to bother with re-writing his outfield lineup again. (I am making this up.) But we now need some revivification efforts in the infield?
Yes, what we have here is the perfect scenario.