35.16. Opening Day Roster

[agrudez]

After sweating over the team's roster crunch, the team went on to sign David Cantu to exacerbate it and trade away Soto, Cano and House to help relieve it. That left them with the following for opening day...

Rotation:
1 Peithner
2 Nicto
3 Tong
4 Charles
5 Quintana

Without Soto, this isn't quite as exciting of a rotation, but we still think it's very good at the top with Peithner and Nicto (the latter of which continues to fill out and looks better and better) and strong through 4 with a pair of young Southpaws in Tong and Charles breaking up the right-handers. We are just now noticing that Quintana got beat with the lump bat in ST so we kind of regret the House trade, though... ugh. Overthought that one, eh? If he struggles, we might try McPetrie or Sandoval in that 5th slot for a bit before hitting the trade market. If Quintana hadn't lumped, I'd have called this a top 10 rotation... now maybe it's only a top 50%.

Bullpen:
MR Cantu
MR Soranzo
MR Sanchez
MR Baez
MR Gutierrez
MR Sandoval
LR McPetrie
LOOGY Contreras

Sanchez is injured for the 1st month, but all in all, this is a very deep, talented bullpen, imo, with no clearly exploitable pitcher in it. Sure, McPetrie and Contreras aren't going to excite anyone, but they will be in emergency SP and LOOGY roles respectively with 6 other quality pitchers in the 'pen to soak up the vast majority of innings. Once Sanchez gets back, we'll have 3 LHP (him, Baez and Contreras) which will give us great flexibility in matching batters late in games. In general, we'll probably go with a "positionless" bullpen - with Cantu, Soranzo and Sanchez set to "use more often". While this unit lacks star power (for whatever that is worth in a bullpen), I can easily see it being in the top 10 of the league in production as a top to bottom sound unit.

Catcher:
Guerero
Hernandez
Adams

Yeah, that's right... 3 catchers - at least for a little bit. Adams will be the short side platoon, Hernandez the strong side and Guerrero will act as a defensive replacement for both late in games. We'll see how it works out. I think getting .700ish OPS and some good defense out of this odd tandem is more than doable.

Infield:
1B Gaona
2B Guzman
3B Wilfer
SS Sullivan
SS Becker

Not much has changed since the last time I talked about the infield. In general, I believe it's a big strength for the roster both defensively and offensively. At the moment, Becker will be platooning with Sullivan, but if he starts to struggle we might see Navarro called up. All in all, I see 3 positions (Wilfer, Gaona and Guzman) whom will post great numbers. SS is a bit of a wildcard just because we've never seen him do it before, but we have confidence in Sullivan's bat and no doubt about neither his nor Becker's glove.

Outfield:
DH Klein
DH Everhart
LF Hall
CF/RF Sandcastle
RF Parrish
CF Condeixeira

Everhart will platoon with Klein at DH and Condex will platoon in CF and push Sandcastle to RF (and Parrish to the bench) against LHP. In general, we consider our outfield almost as much of a strength on both sides of the ball as our infield. We'll be watching Hall's defense (he only made it to a '4' in LF by the end of ST), though, and he might get a quick hook in lieu of Tim Torres later in the season - whom just keeps on bumping... now his OF range... unbelievable! If Hall can stick in LF (and Torres comes up to replace Parrish instead... imagine that!) defensively, his bat projects to be a huge boon to the offense. As does Sandcastle's... and as does Klein's. Parrish is a pretty consistent player so for as long as he's in RF I expect him to continue performing as he always does - and once Torres arrives on the scene the hype will be through the roof.