A Left-field Platoon?

As I mentioned last week, The 2005 Bill James Handbook includes player projections. One of the things I found interesting was taking a look at the Royals projected outfielders, especially in light of the fact that Royals GM Allard Baird has thus far failed to obtain the corner outfielder with power that he talked about just after the season.

He did, however, obtain both Terrance Long and Eli Marrero that might just be able to be a servicable left-field platoon with Long playing against right-handed pitching and Marrero against left-handers. Anyway, here are the projections from James:

         AB   H 2B 3B HR  R RBI RC BB  SO SB CS  AVG  OBP  SLG  OPS      

Long    380 101 22 2   9 50  46 49 29  61  3  2 .266 .318 .405 .723

Marrero 241  63 13 1   8 33  35 33 21  48  4  1 .261 .321 .423 .744

TOTAL   621 164 35 3  17 83  81 82 50 109  7  3 .264 .319 .412 .731

Ok, so these aren't world beater numbers by any means but if you told Baird right now that he would get 17 homeruns, 81 RBIs, and 82 Runs Created from left-field in 2005 he'd probably take it given the disatrous performance by Royals left-fielders in 2004 when they hit just 13 homeruns, struck out 143 times with 43 walks for a .216 average with a microscopic OBP of .283 and a SLG of .324 (they trotted 15 guys out there in 2004 with Dee Brown, the "albatross", and Aaron Guiel garnering the majority of the at bats). Of course, Aaron Guiel is also in the mix assuming he can recover from his eye problems of a year ago.

In right-field, right now it's Matt Stairs and Abraham Nunez. The totals of their projections are very similar though not quite as good at 22 homeruns and 73 Runs Created while in center-field a full year of David DeJesus looks like this:

         AB   H 2B 3B HR  R RBI RC BB  SO SB CS  AVG  OBP  SLG  OPS      

DeJesus 575 168 32  6 12 99  57 86 62  79 16 17 .292 .361 .431 .792

To me, these seem eminately reasonable given DeJesus' performance once he adjusted to major league pitching and particularly given his strong second half .314/.385/.453 performance.

In all, the outfield may not be anything to brag about in 2005 but it could easily improve by 30 runs or so.