Kotsay: What am I missing?

[adambr2]

I'm sure he is a very nice guy and all, so I am surely not saying anything bad here about Mark Kotsay the human being. However, Mark Kotsay the baseball player....

.582 OPS
No defensive value
35 years old
144 PA's

What am I missing? Boggs, Katin, and Gindl are all better options for a 5th outfielder, and they all actually have upside. Is his clubhouse presence that crucial to the fabric of this team? I seem to highly underestimate the value of a team having an aging player in his mid to late 30's there for leadership purposes, regardless of how good they are at baseball.

[greeg35]

What am I missing?

 

 

You aren't missing anything. RR is missing the logical portion of his brain and instead favors what "he sees"; which I don't trust any further than I could throw Prince.

[Funketown]

In Kotsay's defense, it's an OBP-heavy .582 (.231/.306/.277).

 

Allowing Kotsay to earn that $100,000 bonus was pretty silly. That's obviously not a huge sum of cash for a major league team these days, but giving it to him is no more productive than using those bills to pick up dog poo.

 

To put this in perspective, the Brewers now have three players with 100+ PA's who have performed below replacement level. In 2002, the Brewers had two players with 100+ PA's who performed below replacement level. From 2007-2010, the Brewers only had one player (Jody Gerut, 2009) post over 100 PA's below replacement level.

 

So many people get annoyed at those of us who are frustrated with the back end of this team, claiming that even good teams have bad players. The truth is that good teams often have below average players, but rarely give this many plate appearances to horrible players like Betancourt and Kotsay.

[logan82]

Funketown wrote:

Allowing Kotsay to earn that $100,000 bonus was pretty silly. That's obviously not a huge sum of cash for a major league team these days, but giving it to him is no more productive than using those bills to pick up dog poo.

We did get that cash from the Yankees for Mitre...

 

Kotsay has no value on the field that couldn't easily be replaced by 3-4 guys we have in AAA. Green would most likely be a better bench bat with the added bonus of being able to spell McGehee at 3B 2-3 times a week. Boggs could probably match his production plus he can play defense and is a switch hitter. Gamel could easily better what Kotsay brings to the team on offense and defense.(Gamel can't play CF but neither can Kotsay.) That is 3 I know of without really even trying.

 

Of course I would prefer Gamel stay in AAA til about the end of August to keep playing 1B for next year. After that, Gamel up for the rest of the year wouldn't effect him much since the AAA season is almost over and it wouldn't effect his service time.

[adambr2]

Yeah, Kotsay's "ability" to play CF really means nothing to us anyway. We've got one elite CF'er in Gomez and one very good CF'er in Morgan. In the unlikely event that both of them would somehow be unavailable to play CF at the same time, Hart can play CF in a pinch.