Boston Acquires Hermida

Jeremy Hermida seemed destined for the land of non-tenders as late as a week ago, but not any longer as the Boston Red Sox have acquired the corner outfielder via trade.

Hermida is formerly a top prospect with nearly 2,000 plate appearances in the bigs. Over that time his bat has played slightly above average (a .336 wOBA) while his defense has left much to be desired. The story with Hermida has been his lack of power. Since 2007 – when he first broke onto the scene as a true regular – his ISO has slipped in each season. From .205 to .157 down to .133, the soon-to-be 26-year-old was going the wrong way, even drawing some comparisons to former wunderkind-to-bust Ben Grieve. Fenway park is more receptive to offense – putting it lightly – which should raise Hermida’s offensive production without so much as a true increase in talent.

Barring something unforeseen – like Boston not addressing the left field spot further – Hermida figures to be a bench player for them in 2010 and potentially beyond. That’s ssuming he actually starts next season in Boston and isn’t flipped for something else through the off-season.

For their efforts to move Hermida, Florida receives a pair of arms: lefties Hunter Jones and Jose Alvarez.

Jones features impressive minor league numbers but has velocity that averages about 87 miles per hour. He’s a fastball/slider guy and 12 innings is far too small of a sample size to say one way or the other, but if his contact rate continues to be around 87% don’t look for him to sit down nearly 10 batters per nine like he did in the minors. He’s better against lefties, as you would expect.

I know next-to-nothing about Alvarez. He was as starter in the system with unimpressive strikeout rates that somehow dipped to four per nine after switching to relief and heading to High-A.