Wednesday Quickie - 2b SS questions

Hey you ever have your electrician cut both your cable and your phone lines? Nope. Just wondering.

Well knowing TWC I should have my cable fixed sometime around Thanksgiving, so my posts should be sporadic for a while, just letting you know.

Onto the 2nd base and Shortstop Comments :

How about Omar Infante?

Omar Infante would be great!  Imagine if Steve Lombardozzi hit for higher average, more power, fielded better and ran better and that's Infante. (maybe a walk or two more, too but just a few)

There are a couple problems with him though. He could cost the team a first round draft pick if the Tigers offer him a qualifying offer (probably won't). Usually I don't care about that but for a bench player it's something to think about. The second is that if I were coming off his season I'd be looking to start somewhere and the buzz is that's the plan. It seems likely he'll get a multi-year deal at 5+ a year to do just that. What would the Nats have to do to get him to come here where is his playing time is not guaranteed? The Nats need to spend on the bench but not say 20+ million for three years.

Is there anything more confusing than the question "once Espinosa was terrible and demoted why didn't he get his shoulder fixed?

Nope.

Should Espy get the surgery, at the very least to use it as an excuse? 

I'd have to think so. Right now he's basically playing himself into the independent leagues. OK that might be a stretch., if the Nats cut him today someone would pick him up and try him out in AAA, but it's not far from the truth. I don't care how good your D is, a 28 year old punchlessly hitting .210 in AAA is going to be in St. Paul by August. Basically he's got 1 1/2 years on the path he's taking. Go the surgery route though, and you might buy yourself another year as teams hope you just need to recover.  Maybe he's one of those guys that faints when he sees a needle?

Is is possible Espy ruined his swing because of the injury, it healed, and now it just needs to be fixed? 

I suppose. I will say that his time hitting last September immediately after the injury produced similar stats to this year so he'd have had to immediately have changed his swing for the injury and it effected him in the same way then as swinging that way healed does now. Seems doubtful. The other option is that he changed it in the offseason. But wasn't that when he was healing? I just don't see it, but I won't rule it out. That certainly explains the whole "no surgery" angle better than anything else.

WRITE BETTER

Sorry, not going to happen. I know I leave a lot to be desired grammar-wise with these posts.  I can't claim to be an interesting writer, but I do know my punctuation and proper word choice. The thing is that these posts are basically first drafts given a once over for obvious errors or hard to read spots. They are C- work at best.

Why would I put out such a poor representation of what I feel I can do? Time. I don't have the time to conceive, write, check, edit, check again, edit again, final read with minor changes, that I would like to do.  I have time to conceive/write, edit while sort of checking. If this were my ultimate goal, to be a writer about sports, I'd probably put more time into it. But this is my hobby so I'm ok with it

Why not trade Zack Walters if we don't need him at short? 

Walters just made himself into a fringe prospect. He strikes out way too much and he'd be much better at 3rd than SS. Value isn't exactly there yet to get back something usable now by himself, even with the power numbers. Lots of guys can hit AAA homers but can't make enough contact to do it in the majors (see : Moore, Tyler).

What age is too old for a shortstop? 

32/33 or so, but it varies a lot. That's just when fielding is likely to start to diminish at a faster rate. If you are a good fielder to begin with you should be able to eek out a few more decent years than if you were a bad one. Also if you can still hit your team might be able to ignore the fielding for a little while.

For Desmond, if he declines offensively again this year, then I'd say around 32 (won't be hitting by that time so if he's not fielding well he's not of much use). If he stabilizes or goes back up he could probably hack it until 35 or so.  A million caveats of course. So I'd wait a year to see if he's trending down then make your long-term decision. Be prepared to pay either way though. Either a slight overpay for a couple more years past his FA or a dumptruck full of cash for his useful career.

Walters for Loney? 

Loney's a FA.