Today (May 19th), Fernando Tatis started at 3rd base for the New York Mets, perhaps giving David Wright a much needed rest. In his time with the club, Tatis has been far from a star.
Still, Tatis is a valuable baseball player: he can play a tremendous amount of positions (LF, RF, 1B, 3B) and even catcher or 2nd base in the case of an emergency. He's not particularly remarkable defensively at any of these positions, rather, the remarkable thing is that he can play most of them quite adequately.
The point of this post, however, is not his defense but his bat.
For much of the early season, New York Mets fans were subjected to the craptastic pinch hitting of Gary Matthews, Jr. and Frank Catalanotto. Why not Tatis? For awhile, I wasn't even sure that he was on the team anymore... but yes, Fernando is most definitely there.
Consistently gving Cat and GMJ the nod for pinch hits over Tatis is one of the things that stumps me most about Manuel's management of this ball club this year. True, Manuel has always been big on lefty/righty matchups, but I'll take Tatis vs. a righty over either of those two guys any day.
Thankfully, Cat has been sent down and Carter has been called up, so if you want to go with Carter vs. righties I'm fine with that. But if GMJ continues to get the call vs. lefties over Tatis, I'll be at a total loss.
What do you think?
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