Schad wrote:Re: Elmore, my suspicion is that hitting eighth in the NL boosted his OBP last year; the projections have him getting on base quite a bit more than his .277 OBP over a decent sample size previous. Take that away and he's genuinely worse than Goins, or roughly the capability of a good hitting pitcher (but not a Bumgarner).
That said, I too would have taken the Yankees offer, without knowing what the Yankees offer was, for the simple reason that I would have derived an awful lot of pleasure from seeing Goins flailing on another AL East team. It's not a lost cause, however; assuming even modest health, our Goinsian nightmare will be over in relatively short order, and with a performance differential likely being measurable only with the use of a microscope. And I'm also intrigued by the possibility that we're waiting for a bidding war over Ryan Goins, if only because I just got to type 'bidding war over Ryan Goins'.
Certainly that is a factor often overlooked, the old NL-8-hole-OBP bump. But I still have a hard time believing basically any hitter currently in AAA is worse enough than Goins to the point that the drop-off is worth losing a usable asset on the 25 man roster, even if only for a month or two. We did this with Danny Valencia, cutting him loose for no reason when we could have sent Schultz or Tepera to Buffalo. And while we still made the playoffs, it clearly was a net negative that cost the team in the neighbourhood of $10M+ in lost production down the stretch while we continued giving significant time to Revere and Smoak vs LHP.
Anyway... if the plan is to get rid of Goins relatively quickly, it won't matter either way, since the plan is to get rid of both those guys (and hopefully replace them with more useful players). They should act quickly before teams come to their senses.
