“Andy Young homered in DBacks game yesterday. He’s the one we should have kept.”
I like Andy Young okay, Ny, but not as much as some other utility types who were headed to Memphis this year. Talking Tommy Edman, Ramon Urias, Edmundo Sosa. Maybe Drew Robinson. (Probably not Robinson, though. Don’t care about him much. What’s the point of swinging left-handed when you can’t hit MLB pitching?)
You can even throw in Maximus Schrock, and eventually Evan Mendoza by summer I suppose, and Triple-A is going to be pretty crowded pretty quickly, from second base leftward.
Comparing Young to Urias for example, here’s an edited version of a comment from a Fangraphs thread:
“Andy Young is interesting, but…probably there’s more defensive versatility for Urias. And Urias also had fewer strikeouts than Andy Young, and double the walk rate for the same Springfield team at the same exact age. Urias posted a 170 wRC+ in the Texas League this year, after a hefty 164 in the Mexican League last season.”
The Clay Davenport projections like them both, but not equally. Per Davenport’s computer, Andy is a 2-2.5 win guy at his peak, and Ramon a bit above 3, mostly due to defense. And personally I would give Urias a small additional bump because he was stuck in Mexico for several years, when he might have been advancing & improving through the conventional minors; don’t know whether or not he would have received better coaching than he got south of the border, but I do know he would have been facing a higher level of competition at an earlier age. And that helps anyone improve — if they have it in them to improve in the first place.
“I saw on the Cardinals website that they are projecting Shreve, Mayers and Cecil to make the opening day roster.”
Yeah, I saw that too, Willie. The Redbird bullpen looks scary bad right now, especially with the bloom entirely off the Genesis Cabrera winterball rose. All thorns and no nice aroma right now. The Cards simply cannot go north with the current bullpen. It’s a recipe for heartache.
I say the club should trade for Detroit’s Joe Jimenez, even if it means taking 75-80% of Jordan Zimmermann’s contract ($50M total for the next two years). Heck, the way Z has thrown this spring, he’d be in the mix for the Cardinal rotation right now. Joe Jimenez looks like the next Edwin Diaz, to me.
The relief corps needed an offseason overhaul, and instead it was almost entirely overlooked. This needs to be remedied and real soon.