Willy Tavares - 5th OF?

I think the biggest issue isn’t that he wasn’t highly regarded, it’s that he wasn’t highly regarded enough. He started his career with the Yankees and unless you’re a once in lifetime prospect (or at least hyped as one) you just don’t move up to the Majors with them. They’ll sign a vet before they give a nobody a shot. Add in that he was a college guy so he was already 22 when he started his pro career and you’ve got the makings of a guy who’s not gonna get a chance. He was 26 before he even got to AAA, which is nuts since his 2003 at AA as a 24 year old was decent enough to justify a promotion (unfortunately the Yanks often take the same approach to their AAA, just sign a vet) and the next year as a 25 year old was ridiculous and he should have been promoted sooner. So as a 26 and 27 year old he puts up 2 very good years with Columbus in a league that generally favors pitchers. I got to see him play a ton of times these two years and he was generally one of the more impressive hitters around. But, at this point he’s 27 and hasn’t played in the Majors, which, fairly or not, creates a stigma. People think you’ll never be able to play in the Majors because you haven’t already. It’s a Catch 22 and it happens all the time. And his new team, the Dodgers, is more apt to call up the guys they put time and money into developing than some guy they signed to fill out a AAA roster. Then he gets hurt and misses the second half of 07, which means he won’t get called up that year, and the first half of 08, which means he won’t get called up that year because some other guy that’s been grinding it out all year gets advantage. No clue why, he just does. So finally, in 09, he’s doing so well that the Dodgers can’t help but call him up when they need a DH for their interleague play. But, they only use him for that week and don’t even bother to call him back up in September, mostly because by then they have Jim Thome and don’t need a guy like Jones.

Really, there are plenty of logical reasons why Jones, and other guys like him, was never given much of a shot, and very little of it had anything to do with the way he played. This has always been one of the more fascinating things about baseball to me, so much so that I wrote a novel about the phenomena.

As far as what we should realistically expect out of Jones, I don’t honestly know. My guess is that if he got regular at bats, especially as part of a platoon, he’d probably be very effective. He likely wouldn’t hit for a high average, it’d probably drop toward the .250 range, but he’d hit the ball with authority and take some walks, along his fair share of strikeouts. If he was relegated to a less regular role off the bench, I’d like to have the confidence to think that he could handle it, but honestly you never know because the guy has never been a bench player. He’s been playing every day his whole career, and he’s not even a guy with the “pinch hitting” experience of being a DH because he’s a good enough fielder in RF, LF, and 1B that there’s no reason to waste the DH spot on him (by waste I mean use it on him when a worse fielder could be put there).

I think if anyone expects him to come in and hit 40 home runs and win Rookie of the Year as a 32 year old they’re crazy, but I don’t think it’s out of the question that he could earn the spot that Greg Norton had last year, as a first or second option pinch hitter, and one who provides more versatility on defense. While I’m sure there was an inflation in his stats by playing in the PCL, this guy is a true hitter, a true power hitter, and I think he can succeed in the Majors. The fact is, a lot of times the “marginal” guys who end up in AAA forever become better hitters than most of the Major League bench guys because they get the opportunity to play every day (think Keith Lockhart).

While I do think he could be very successful assuming Norton’s role on the bench, I’m betting that he ends up at AAA Gwinnett to start the year, and for the vast majority of the season. Again, it won’t be fair, but that’s the crappy situation for guys like Mitch.

Herb Washington all over again. And he wasn’t even that good a pinch runner. He kept getting picked off.

You could just concentrate on putting the best baseball players on the field instead of looking for pure speed, which is why we’re not going to add Wily Taveras.