Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Irresponsible speculation: Carlos Delgado edition

The New York Post wonders about the possibility that the Mets might follow the Jays' lead and cut ties with their slumping first baseman Carlos Delgado.
Which raises the question for us: IF the Mets tie the can to Delgado, would King Carlos consider a return to Toronto? And more to the point, would the Jays' front office want him?

Delgado has been in decline for a couple of seasons, although if you were the sort of person who cherrypicked the stats you wanted to make your point, you could show that Delgado was as effective as Matt Stairs versus righties in 2007.

Delgado vs RHP: 367 ABs, 20 HRs, 57 RsBI, .818 OPS.
Stairs vs RHP: 312 ABs, 21 HRs, 53 RsBI, er, um....931 OPS.

Okay...maybe not quite as effective. But vaguely comparable. Almost.

Speaking of faint praise, the Mets hitting coach Howard Johnson told the New York Times that Delgado's 2008 performance is "not as bad as it looks."

We'd usually dump on anyone who came up with this sort of fanciful BS notion of returning a player to the team for completely sentimental reasons. But there's something about the idea of seeing Delgado back in Toronto that melts away all of our reason and good sense.

9 comments:

The Ack said...

I mean, love me some vintage Delgado, but is he any better than the big Overbay or Matty Stairs (whose AB he would presumably take) at this point though? I dunno.

Anonymous said...

On paper, you're right. Carlos vs Matt is pretty much a wash. But there is something about seeing him back in Blue that would be very cool. BTW - Yankees are considering dumping Giambi now....Guess the Thomas move has inspired a few GMs (or reporters at least).

Link: http://www2.nysun.com/article/75052

Tao of Stieb said...

We know it's wrong...

But then again, so was bringing back Tony Fernandez about five times.

Also, anyone know if Jimmy Key can still throw a curve ball?

The Ack said...

fuck that, bringing back Tony was a stroke of genius every time.

One of, if not my all time favorite Blue Jays.

Jimmy's probably still pissed about bring bumped from the post-season rotation.....but yeah, another stellar Blue Jay. He was Tom Glavine before Tom Glavine became Tom Glavine.

Tao of Stieb said...

You're right Ack: It was a stroke of genius pretty much every time. It's just that maybe on paper, we could have argued against it beforehand.

But god bless Tony, and his rubber band work outs, and his bad Christian pop entrance music.

Hey, we've already got Shannon Stewart back...we can bring back Carlos, and Shawn Green, and Alex Gonzalez, and rock it out like it's 1998 all over again. We can even bring back Craig Grebeck as Little X's stunt double.

Why are we getting all wrapped up in something that's not going to happen?

Navin Vaswani (@eyebleaf) said...

i'd welcome back carlos with open arms. he was great. and tao i'm down with everyone on your list EXCEPT alex gonzalez. god i hated that guy.

Anonymous said...

Check out the comments on that Post Delgado piece. A lot of people saying that Carlos looks 30 pounds lighter and can't hit the fastball anymore.

Anonymous said...

You know what - I was thinking that. I've noticed a lot of guys looking smaller...and slower. Hmmmm....you guys thinking what I'm thinking? Sheffield, Ortiz, Giambi, Delgado, Howard. I even noticed Overbay's arms looking kinda....thin. 0 home runs this late? Something is up.....

Anonymous said...

Getting him for the minimum as Oakland got Frank would be interesting, not sure if he fits on the roster though unless you drop Stew (which exposes Lind vs LHP) or block Lind (which is too high a price).