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Art Deco · 01-24-2025, 06:43 PM

Writing up the midseason report enabled me to take a good, hard look at this team and I decided the defensive woes were just untenable.

So we start with a big trade:

As mentioned if we were going to improve the D an Avalos had to go, and it wasn't going to be Jesus. So we say goodbye to the popular Zeke (the fan interested almost crashed!) and hello to White, a slick-fielding 2B who can hit (career 282/330/445 and is right on those numbers this year) and is on pace for 4.6 WAR this year. So by moving Jesus to RF where's he's an average-to-plus defender and putting White at 2B where he's about +11 ZR compared to Jose Machado, we've greatly improved the D. What does that mean for the .330+ hitting Machado? Well for one I don't think he's going to keep hitting .330 - he's a 50-55 contact guy who's shown as a .275 hitter in the editor so regression was coming, and we'll platoon him and Dantel Chinchilla at 2B/SS. White can also play SS but not much better than Chinchilla. Meanwhile to play CF we've recalled Henry Dominguez, who was profiled at the end of the midseason review. Dominguez is a LH batter who needs work against lefties, so he'll platoon with Brian Whittaker, who's already been playing CF against LHP and doing quite well. To make room for him we're going to do something with Kang-cheol Lee, either trading or waiving him as he lost the 3B job and White and Alex Brown can back up at 3B when necessary. I haven't traded him yet since I used up my 5 "shop a player" tries working on the above deal and will have to wait until the next day.

There's also a salary savings element as White is making the minimum and Avalos was pulling down about $12M, so we free up about $6M to take on in salary if we want to. White is arb-eligible next year but his projected $4-5M pales in comparison to the $17M Zeke was expected to receive. All in all, we do take a hit on offense as Zeke was our second-biggest power source, but we should more than make up the lost offense with a major upgrade at CF, RF and 2B defensively. And I almost forgot - we upgraded prospect-wise as well as Jimenez has 50-60 hitting tools and should be an average CF or above-average corner guy in the future while Polk was a reliever with decent stuff who never looked to have more than 35 control.

01-24-2025, 06:43 PM	#2791
Art Deco Hall Of Famer Join Date: May 2020 Posts: 7,568	Shakeup time (again) Writing up the midseason report enabled me to take a good, hard look at this team and I decided the defensive woes were just untenable. So we start with a big trade: As mentioned if we were going to improve the D an Avalos had to go, and it wasn't going to be Jesus. So we say goodbye to the popular Zeke (the fan interested almost crashed!) and hello to White, a slick-fielding 2B who can hit (career 282/330/445 and is right on those numbers this year) and is on pace for 4.6 WAR this year. So by moving Jesus to RF where's he's an average-to-plus defender and putting White at 2B where he's about +11 ZR compared to Jose Machado, we've greatly improved the D. What does that mean for the .330+ hitting Machado? Well for one I don't think he's going to keep hitting .330 - he's a 50-55 contact guy who's shown as a .275 hitter in the editor so regression was coming, and we'll platoon him and Dantel Chinchilla at 2B/SS. White can also play SS but not much better than Chinchilla. Meanwhile to play CF we've recalled Henry Dominguez, who was profiled at the end of the midseason review. Dominguez is a LH batter who needs work against lefties, so he'll platoon with Brian Whittaker, who's already been playing CF against LHP and doing quite well. To make room for him we're going to do something with Kang-cheol Lee, either trading or waiving him as he lost the 3B job and White and Alex Brown can back up at 3B when necessary. I haven't traded him yet since I used up my 5 "shop a player" tries working on the above deal and will have to wait until the next day. There's also a salary savings element as White is making the minimum and Avalos was pulling down about $12M, so we free up about $6M to take on in salary if we want to. White is arb-eligible next year but his projected $4-5M pales in comparison to the $17M Zeke was expected to receive. All in all, we do take a hit on offense as Zeke was our second-biggest power source, but we should more than make up the lost offense with a major upgrade at CF, RF and 2B defensively. And I almost forgot - we upgraded prospect-wise as well as Jimenez has 50-60 hitting tools and should be an average CF or above-average corner guy in the future while Polk was a reliever with decent stuff who never looked to have more than 35 control. Last edited by Art Deco; 01-24-2025 at 06:44 PM.