Is It Time To End The Ronny Cedeno Era?
When Jose Lopez returns from the bereavement list next week, the M’s will have to ship a middle infielder back to Tacoma. Chris Woodward is the obvious candidate, since he just came up from Triple-A. But, as I watched Ronny Cedeno take a few more ridiculous swings today, I have to wonder if he’s the guy who should head back to the minors. He just looks broken.
He walks as much as Lopez, strikes out as much as Branyan, and hits for power like Yuni. Maybe you could explain his .132 batting average as bad luck, but then you look at his batted ball profile and see a line drive percentage of 4.3%. Cedeno isn’t making contact very often, and even when he does, it’s a ground ball or a fly ball, giving him a high percentage of making an out and a very low percentage of doing anything useful.
He’s a solid defender, he’s only 26, and he has some history of being able to hit in the minors, but man, right now, he just looks lost at the plate. He’s out of options, so the team can’t send him back to Tacoma without passing him through waivers, but I doubt there’s going to be a stampede to claim a guy with a .190 wOBA. Playing once or twice a week isn’t working for him, and if he’s ever going to be a productive player for the M’s, he’s probably going to have to undergo some changes to his swing. That’s a lot easier to fix when you’re actually playing, and he simply hasn’t hit well enough to let Wak put him in the line-up with any regularity.
Chris Woodward certainly isn’t the answer to anything (nor is anyone else in the organization – please, Jack, get us a middle infielder or two!), but he can play SS/2B without being a total disaster and hit .200 at least. Sadly, that would be an upgrade over what we’re getting from Cedeno at the moment.
I’m not ready to give up on Ronny Cedeno entirely, but this isn’t working. When Lopez comes back, I’d like to see the team outright him to Tacoma – if someone else wants to claim him, so be it, but at least they’d have a shot at getting him to Triple-A where he can try to fix his problems.
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Cleveland is getting -0.4 WAR from Luis Valbuena, by the way. Coincidentally, that’s the second worst on their team and is actually defensively worse than Cedeno at the moment.
Fontaine insisted on Morse being part of the Garcia trade, so it isn’t correct to label him as a thrown in. Personally, I would rather have received a pitcher in return as the third player in that trade.
I do not advocate Morse replacing Betancourt, but I would like to see him replace Cedeno, as middle infield backup. Morse is having a fine year in Tacoma, and is redhot (.933 OPS, June). Moreover, Morse has .762 OPS, as compared to Cedeno’s .625 OPS, in the majors. Morse would also give the M’s more pop. Is that worth the dropoff in defense? I think so for such a poor offensive club in the AL West.
This discussion once again reminds us that Bavasi’s mistake, in trading Asdrubal Cabrera for 87 AB’s of Eduardo Perez, has had a much longer lasting impact than many people thought.
We just added another option: Josh Wilson off waivers from San Diego of all places.
Here’s my thing on Mike Morse. Sure he sucks, but Yuni and Cedeno suck too. So it’s a matter of which sucks less (at least until JZ can make a move to fix the problem, which may be soon and may be in the off-season).
From the numbers I’ve seen, Morse sucks most on defense, with Yuni a little better, then Cedeno best. And the list more or less reverses when you talk about offense. But from some analysis above, it tends to look like the net gain of Morse over Yuni/Cedeno would benefit the team a bit and if he happened to go on a random hot streak to start, might even give him some sort of trade value. On the flipside if he was awful all around, it doesn’t really change anything from what we’ve been currently seeing. So it couldn’t really hurt. It’s a matter of perhaps that Morse sucks less overall then Yuni / Cedeno, not that he doesn’t suck. In the end it’s really remarkable the extreme lack of depth at short this organization has when Morse is possibly our current best option there. *shudders*
Over the last few years, the Mariners have not been shy about DFA’ing non-performing players with larger contracts (Vidro, Boone, Everett, Sexson, Olerud) than the folks we’ve been talking here (Cedeno, Balentien, Yuni). So I’m curious as to what the holdup is. Surely trade value or salary can’t be much of a consideration?
From the point of view of the best lineup to put on the field, politics aside, I’m wondering what the Mariners could/should do. For example, would it make sense to play Carp at least some of the time at 1B and LF, with Branyan DH’ing instead of Griffey or Sweeney? Bring up Saunders? Play Woodward & Wilson at SS? With Lopez improving his hitting latey, 2B doesn’t seem like as big a crisis as it was a few weeks back.