Jeff Bailey played first base for the Boston Red Sox until an injury put him on the disabled list on July 5th. He did not return to the major league club. Jeff played 2009 as a 30-year-old, and with only 56 MLB games under his belt, it’s unlikely he’ll get many more chances to prove himself a major leaguer. He does have a good eye for the strike zone, walking 19 times in 136 at bats. That helped turn a poor .228 BA into an okay .340 OBP. With an isolated power of .206, he also tended to get a high percentage of extra base hits.
Unfortunately, those numbers just aren’t good enough for an offensive position like first base. Bailey strikes out a ton, and when a hitter does that he needs to make up for it with lots of walks and lots of power, and Bailey just doesn’t do those enough. He’s okay as an injury fill in. He doesn’t make a ton of outs, but he doesn’t add all that much to the offense. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was out of the game soon.
On the other hand, remember last season when the GM of the Royals, Dayton Moore said he wanted to improve the team’s OBP, then went out and traded for Mike Jacobs? Imagine if he had traded for Jeff Bailey, and he managed to post a .340 OBP? He would have been cheap (Jacobs cost $3.25 million), as he earned near the league minimum. In general, if you have a problem at first base, someone somewhere has a cheap solution in their minor league system. Moore wanted to fix the OBP problem, and Bailey could have helped without costing the Royals an arm and a leg.
Posted by David Pinto at 8:36 pm | Players, Players A to Z | Permalink | No Comments
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