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After lasts seasons brutal 76-86 finish, Twin Cities management made two proclamations. The first is that they were going to take a step back and rebuild. The second is that franchise player Felix Ramos would not be put in a situation to hurt the team defensively. With the recent signings of Marco Acheson, Roberto Rivera, and Omer Dijkstra, both statements appear to be a lie. The 3 veteran players signed to short term deals play 1B, 3B, and LF respectively. Throw in David Simpson(RF) and Sertaç Safavî(DH) and Twin Cities has plugged every position not named second base that Ramos is "capable" of playing.
The thing is, a large portion of Twin Cities success so far this season has been the stellar up the middle defense of Kelsey Perry(+2.9) and Ignacio Venegas(+2.4). In fact, the River Monsters have the best defensive efficiency in the league thus far as well as the number one starting pitching ERA with a rag tag rotation. Sure, adding Dijstra's bat and shifting the defense to push Perry or Venagas to the bench makes the lineup much better. But does the hurt on the defense outweigh the good? We asked manager Gerald Brandt how he'll go about filling pout his lineup card moving forward.
"Look, the commitment to defense has had huge results for us this season. Venegas and Perry our going to continue to be our keystone combo for the most part. Adding Rivera and Dijkstra also helps our team defense out tremendously. But it's a long season and people are going to need days off. Ramos is flexible enough to cover every position but C. Even SS, where we can play Ramos at second and move Venegas to short and CF where we can have Ramos on a corner and move Dijkstra to CF. So he will no doubt play somewhere everyday.
As far as how much in each spot? Well, against lefties Dijkstra struggles, so you can pencil Ramos into LF everytime a southpaw is on the hill. Rivera and Safavi are both on the team mostly to hit LHP. We want to keep them fresh and in a position to succeed. So giving them each a blow every week against a tough righty is not the worst idea. Rivera, Dijkstra and Venegas are also fragile. To not expect them to have a DL trip or two through the course of 162 game season would be naive. And of course, we use sabermetrics and hit charts to fill our lineups every day. If we play a team that doesn't hit a lot of balls to second base, then it absolutely makes sense to start Ramos over Venagas to maximize offense. So, yeah. Ramos doesn't really factor into our plug and play lineups, but we don't really operate like that anyway. Rest assure, he will play somewhere everyday unless it's him that needs a rest while using his versatility to our advantage."
So there you have it. It sounds as if the Dijkstra and Rivera signings were just too good to pass up and the River Monsters plan to hide Ramos by shuffling him into a spot that is likely to see the least amount of balls, determined on a game to game basis. Only time will tell if this strategy works out.