Marwin, Marwin, And Santana

AAAAAHHHHHH

As it turns out this image has nothing to do with what I wrote about, but it’s almost 1am and I’m not going to go find a more appropriate image so I apologize but you’ll just have to live with this image of Bobby Dalbec messing up a routine ground ball in yesterday’s SUPER FUN loss to the Royals. I regret the error.

The Royals aren’t terrible. They aren’t a bunch of alligators with gloves. They aren’t monkeys with hats. They aren’t the Detroit Tigers. If you try to, you can lose to the Royals. This is a fact, and one the Red Sox spent the weekend demonstrating in, of all places, Kansas City. You can’t say they’re not full service, those Red Sox.

The Sox spent Fathers’ Day kicking the ball around so much that Alex Cora, who gets paid to say nice things about them to the media, said their defense was, and I quote, “terrible.” There’s no real way to parse that. To paraphrase the words of a great fictional American, terrible is as terrible does. Ultimately it didn’t matter if the Red Sox were playing the Royals, the Tigers, or a group of sentient living room furniture, you just can’t boot the ball around that much and expect to win a major league baseball game.

That’s both the beauty and the pain of a major league season. There are these games and there are, if we’re being honest, probably a lot of them in a given major league team’s major league season. Even the best teams have bad days and most teams aren’t the best teams and, as good as this Red Sox team is, they’re probably not the best teams either, so we get the occasional day like Sunday. That’s the painful part, that we get that and we get it more than once, some seasons way more than once. The beauty is we get tomorrow too.

Marwin

I’m pretty done with Marwin Gonzalez as a Red Sox player. He’s just not - and I don’t want to get too technical here, so please bear with me through the jargon - good. But Matt, you say, he’s so good defensively, and you just spent three paragraphs saying the Red Sox were so bad defensively that they would’ve lost to various zoo animals. That’s a fair point, or at least the second part, but I’m going to push back on the first part, because, is he really that good defensively?

Truth be told I don’t actually care if he’s a good defensive left fielder or first baseman. He can’t hit. His bat doesn’t come close to carrying either of those positions so it doesn’t matter if he’s slightly above average or slightly below average in left or at first. The Red Sox should have better options there and in fact they do. Who, you ask? Anyone on the roster (with one exception we’ll get to in a moment) not named Marwin Gonzalez.

But, you say, he can play second! Now we’re getting somewhere. Yes. He can play second base just fine and that is true and accurate. I don’t mind seeing him play second base at all, and the advanced metrics and eye test both support his ability to be average or slightly above at the position. But. He can’t hit.

The league average second baseman in 2021 has a wRC+ of 98 (100 is league average), so the league average second baseman is a hair below the league average hitter. That means, even if Marwin were 15 or 20 percent below league average you could probably twist your brain into a pretzel enough to be okay with him starting at second base. Problem is he’s not 15 or 20 percent below league average. He’s 41 percent below league average. Lest you think that’s an anomaly, he was 34 percent below league average as a hitter last season.

Marwin seems like a nice dude, and I hate advocating for someone to lose their job, but he’s bad and if you look at his batted ball data on Baseball Savant, it doesn’t look like it’s going to get any better. If you look at his monthly splits, hoping against hope that he’s on some kind of secret hot streak that might justify his presence on the roster, nope, I’m sorry. He’s not. No hot streak, secret or not. He’s just not good, full stop.

The Red Sox have other guys who can play second base. They have other guys who can play first base. They have other guys who play third and left field. But Matt, you say, you didn’t touch on the most important thing he does, which is backup Xander at shortstop. Ah, I was hoping you’d bring that up. He is the backup shortstop, and if Xander ever got hurt, they’d be pretty screwed because, you’re right, they don’t have anyone else on the major league roster who can play short. But, again with the “here’s the thing,” here’s the thing: if they have to play Marwin Gonzalez at shortstop for anything beyond a spot start, they’re pretty screwed anyway.

And that’s the funny-as-in-sad part of this: Marwin can’t play shortstop. Yes, he’s the backup shortstop, but he’s not a shortstop. He can’t play short on anything other than an emergency basis, so when you get right down to it, what good is that, really?

He can’t hit and he can’t really do much of what is really needed defensively. It’s not really his fault. It’s just kinda that time in his career. The Sox are asking him to do things that are beyond his reach right now. They didn’t used to be, but now they are. They should DFA Marwin and call up Jonathan Arauz. He’s not really hitting in Triple-A, but he can hit as badly as Marwin and he can actually play shortstop. It was a good try by the front office. It could’ve worked. Maybe in some other universe it did work and Marwin is back to his 2017 self and everywhere Chaim Bloom goes people are patting him on the back and saying, “Hey, nice job signing Marwin Gonzalez!” But not here, not in this universe.

Marwin Again

But of course I get that none of the above is likely to happen soon. The Red Sox like Gonzalez’s flexibility, which is a bit like saying I like how this piece of cheese fits in all the holes in this boat, but fine, okay, they’re going to ride this out for now. The only thing to ask then is please please please

please stop batting Marwin Gonzalez, baseball player who can’t hit, at the top of the goshdarn lineup. Seriously. Please.

I’m past trying to reason about it. I’m past trying to prove it’s a bad idea with stats, or by pointing better lineup options. I’m just begging now. Begging. It’s all I have. Please. I’m begging you. Stop hitting Marwin Gonzalez and Danny Santana in the leadoff spot. Please.

Danny Santana

Speaking of, I hope in the future there is peace in the world. I hope the globe heals itself and people can all live in harmony. I hope there is happiness and no disease. I hope the Rays never win another baseball game and MLB decides that, sure they make a lot of money, but the world will be much better off without the New York Yankees. But all of those things are long term goals, things that will, while they are worth the fight, take years or even decades or more to accomplish. So in the interim, while we’re all working on this other stuff, maybe the universe could just throw us a bone and remove Danny Santana from the Red Sox roster. Call up Jarren Duran (who homered again yesterday) or recall Franchy Cordero. Or call up Jonathan Arauz and don’t ever play him. Seriously. Anything. Please just make it stop.

Is all of the above mean? I hope it doesn’t come off that way. It’s the middle of June now. The Red Sox are fighting for first place in their division. We’ve done this, we’ve tested it out, and it’s not working. There are better options, and if they are not better options, they are at least different options with a small possibility of being better, which is a larger possibility of being better than what we have at the present time, which has no possibility of being better.

But, again, I get that that isn’t likely to happen. I understand there’s something mesmerizing about Santana’s beard or maybe it’s his ability to make an astounding number of outs in a very small number of plate appearances. Regardless of the reason, I just have one small request, just one minuscule ask, one teeny tiny plea: please stop batting Danny Santana in the leadoff spot.