Junior Spivey is upset

Today's Washington Post reports that Junior Spivey apparently is upset that he is now a back-up second baseman instead of a starter. Spivey had to know that this would be his fate when Jose Vidro returned from the DL, but Spivey is a competitive guy so we're not surprised that he wants to play every day. The problem for him is that Vidro is a much better hitter. Spivey's career stats are .354 OBP, .436 SLG, and .790 OPS, and he is underperforming those career stats by a pretty wide margin this year. In Milwaukee, his stats this year in 182 at bats were .308 OBP, .374 SLG, and .682 OPS. His stats in Washington are better, although he has had only 77 at bats: .330 OBP, .390 SLG, and .720 OPS. Meanwhile, Vidro's career OPS of .864 is almost 100 points higher than Spivey's, and his 2005 OPS of .838 is more than 100 points higher than Spivey's. There is at this point no reasonable argument that Spivey should start over Vidro.

If Spivey could play shortstop, it would make sense to start him over the anemic Cristian Guzman. The problem is that Spivey has played shortstop in only two games since 2001. On the other hand, perhaps moving him to shortstop is worthy of a second-half experiment....

The same article suggests that Frank Robinson is thinking of moving Wilkerson to left and platooning Ryan Church and Marlon Byrd in center. We're OK with everything but the Marlon Byrd part. Byrd hasn't shown that he's a consistently productive major league hitter. His career numbers are pretty bad (.328 OBP, .368 SLG, and .696 OPS), especially for a player who purports to be an outfielder. He does have better split numbers against left-handers (.350 OBP, .389 SLG, and .739 OPS) than right-handers (.289 OBP, .256 SLG, and .544 OPS), so you might think that a platoon is in order. But far from being unable to hit left-handers, Church has held his own regardless of whether the pitcher is left-handed (.385 OBP, .522 SLG, and .906 OPS) or right-handed (.380 OBP, .547 SLG, and .927 OPS). Yes, it's true that Church has only 23 at bats against left-handers, but why not play him until he shows he can't hit lefties?