Tonight’s Mets Lineup vs. Pirates
Here is tonight’s Mets lineup to face Pirates righthander Charlie Morton:
Willie Harris – 3B
Justin Turner – 2B
Carlos Beltran – RF
Daniel Murphy – 1B
Angel Pagan – CF
Josh Thole – C
Jason Pridie – LF
Ruben Tejada – SS
Dillon Gee – P
It seems like whenever I knock Willie Harris, he reaches base four times. But I don’t care about those blips beyond the mean — with Jose Reyes and David Wright out of the lineup, I want Angel Pagan getting a guaranteed at-bat in the first inning. In fact, I probably want Pagan somewhere in the top three even with Reyes and Wright in the lineup. But that’s just me.
Question: if Willie Harris and Justin Turner flipped positions, would Harris be batting second?
I see they have the Spring Training “B” line-up up again. Sorry to hear about Reyes’ grandmother, all the same.
Harris has had two multi-hit games all season. The 3-for-4 day from last week, and a two-hit game on Opening Day. He’s hitting .258 with a .710 OPS as a starter this year. Take out that 3-for-4 day and his average plummets to .225. He’s simply not a good hitter, and shouldn’t be hitting leadoff for an MLB team.
That said, he’ll probably go 5-for-5 tonight with 5 runs scored. 🙂
What you say really is fine as far as it goes. I would just add that it pays to have a decent hitter in the middle of the line-up too.
You want good hitters in every spot of your lineup if possible. But to put a terrible hitter at leadoff for the purpose of putting a better hitter in the middle lineup is illogical. The best hitters should always get the most at-bats, and good hitters should get more at-bats than terrible hitters.
Harris started exactly three games as an infielder before this ballgame, and went 1-2, 0-4, 3-4. Yes, that’s a total of 4-10, but all it tells us is that he happened to go 3-4 on the same day he happened to be playing the infield. His career OPS is .678, which is terrible, and his OPS this year is .638, which is beyond terrible. Will he have a good game every now and then? Sure, every MLBer does, eventually. That doesn’t justify having him hit leadoff.
I’d toss out there that Darling said it made sense to pull out Pelfrey the other day.
I don’t really understand that logic. The lead-off guy is going to have another at bat at most. Say you put Pagan at the top of the line-up. You have an emptiness in the middle of the line-up. Until Thole got his big hit, note how that turned out: repeatedly, people were left in scoring position.
Lol. Again, he was quite “decent” the few times he played as an infielder and that is w/o knowing if any of the 0 of 4 included some good hacks. There weren’t any great options with this line-up and having a big dead zone after Murphy wasn’t a great option either.