At first, I wasn’t worried that ESPN’s Buster Olney was reporting that the Mets were interested in Dodger disaster Andruw Jones, still owed something like $15M in salary and $7.1M in bonuses for one more year of his dubious services. After all, if you’re going to get someone to take Luis Castillo, you have to take back someone the other team can’t wait to get rid of.
And then Olney writes:
But it’s unlikely that the Dodgers would have interest in Castillo, because they have a young second baseman in Blake DeWitt, and Castillo does not play a lot of different positions.
First of all, DeWitt was primarily a third baseman last year. According to baseball-reference.com, DeWitt played 95 games at third and 27 at second. So even if the Dodgers are planning to use him at second after acquiring Casey Blake, he does have another position if the Dodgers got Castillo.
No, the real reason the Dodgers are unlikely to have interest in Castillo is that it is unlikely that ANY major league team would have interest in Castillo at his salary.
But for the Dodgers to even mention trading Jones without taking back Castillo is just plain insulting.
In fact, the Mets might actually be better off with Castillo than Jones.
Andruw Jones hit .158 last year in 209 at bats. .158! A full 42 points below the Mendoza Line.
Pedro Martinez isn’t exactly the Sultan of Swat, and he hit .154 in 2008. Johan Santana spent his whole career before 2008 in a league with the DH, and he managed to hit .141.
But the real comparison is with Castillo, who had a bad year at the plate, only batting .245.
That’s 87 points higher than Jones.
And if you’re thinking that maybe Jones, who used to be a power hitter, at least had most of his base hits leave the ballpark, nope, he only had three homers and 14 RBI in those 209 AB.
Jones’ slugging percentage was .249, barely higher than Castillo’s batting average.
Fortunately, metsmerizedonline.com and hotfootblog.com have both noted that Marty Noble of mlb.com says that the Mets are no longer looking at Jones.
And that’s just as well, because not only is he a .158 hitter, but no good can come of the Mets trading for a former Braves star named Jones.
Add The Sports Daily to your Google News Feed!
