Step up Jimmy!

My bologna has a first name, it’s J-A-M-E-S.

Just like my last post, I want to preface this by saying that I’m a Loney fan.  I was all about Loney back in the day when Russel Martin, Ethier, Loney and Kemp represented the bright future of the Dawyers.

But I have to admit, I have been struggling with Loney all season & I have watched more games this season than I ever have.

Let’s start in the field:

His fielding percentage is fine, still up there where it should be at .994 from a statistical standpoint, but anybody who has watched a game knows that Loney is the Roger Dorn of Chavez Ravine.

I don’t get it??  Loney is being paid like the big boys ($4.875M), but he’s playing like a prima donna. Feeble attempt to the left, weak a– movement to the right…if you don’t hit it to him, he ain’t about to get his uni all dusted up…for what?  $4.8 MILLION???  Nah, going to have to pay him big money for that.

Don’t believe me?  Just for fun, look up “James Loney diving” on the internet.  Good luck finding anything post 2009 that has anything to do with a diving offensive play.  Now look up “Albert Pujols diving.”  I’m not saying Loney is Pujols…but that’s why I’m saying it.

And a slugger he ain’t:

Wikipedia defines “Slugging Percentage” as follows:

"In baseball statistics, slugging percentage (abbreviated SLG) is a popular measure of the power of a hitter.  It is calculated as total bases divided by at bats:Where AB is the number of at-bats for a given player, and 1B, 2B, 3B and HR are the number of singles, doubles, triples and home runs.  Walks are specifically excluded from this calculation.  For example, in 1920, Babe Ruth played his first season for the New York Yankess.  In 458 at bats, Ruth had 172 hits, comprising 73 singles, 36 doubles, 9 triples and 54 home runs, which brings the total basecount to 73 + 36 × 2 + 9 × 3 + 54 × 4 = 388. His total number of bases (388) divided by his total at-bats (458) is .847, his slugging percentage for the season. The next year he slugged .846, and these records went unbroken until 200, when Barry Bonds achieved 411 bases in 476 at-bats, bringing his slugging percentage to .863, unmatched since."

I decided to do a little research (honestly didn’t know how it’d come out) and looked at all NL starting first basemen – I made it a (65) game minimum once I saw some guys on the DL, and some platoon guys (i.e. D-Backs).

I only looked at Slugging Percentage and home runs.  There were only two guys (Lyle Overbay & Brad Hawpe) who were worse than Dorn..er..Loney in the entire National League in slugging percentage & he was tied with 3 other guys for least amount of HR’s.

To be fair to Hawpe, he’s now on the DL with a finger that’s been bugging him all year.

Overbay is fighting for his job because of lack of production.  His slugging percentage is .350, Loney’s is .354.

Here are the stats I came up with:

I’m no sabermetrician (though I did have 17 pages of color-coded stats collated and sliced up with a ginsu for my fantasy draft) but I don’t think I need to be.  I don’t even have to look up the AL stats, I know where #7 is going to be.

Again, I like James Loney.  Liked him from the start, and still do.  I jumped up when he hit the grand salami the other night.  And I really loved that reality show he did with Kendra – but we’re paying some big bucks for little dividends.

I wouldn’t even mind so much if he just hustled. Is that too much to ask??