Jo-Jo Reyes will not go down in history as the starting pitcher with the longest winless streak. As it stands, his 28 starts in between victories is tied for the longest stretch in MLB History. After last tasting victory on June 13, 2008, Reyes was a winner last night.

In addition to getting his first win since 2008, Reyes tossed a complete game for the first time in his big league career. The lefty scattered eight hits over nine innings against the Cleveland Indians, allowing a run on a solo-blast by Shelley Duncan. He struck out four batters while walking an equal amount, but induced 13 groundballs – including three double-play balls. While Reyes earned the victory against the Indians, it was not his best game of the season.

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Continuing our Trade Targets series, here are five middle infielders who could be available at (or before) the deadline.

PLAYER: Jose Reyes
TEAM: Mets
POSSIBLE DESTINATION(S): Giants, Reds, Brewers
CONTRACT STATUS: $11 million, free agent after the season
PROJECTED WAR: 3.3

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When talking about a player’s defensive value, you will almost never hear things like errors or fielding percentage discussed on FanGraphs. These metrics have all kinds of problems, and we simply have better ways to evaluate the abilities of defenders nowadays. Occasionally, errors and fielding percentage do tell the story correctly, however. For instance, I present Edwin Encarnacion.

The Blue Jays began the season with E5 as their starting third baseman. He’s played 141 innings in 16 games at the position this year during which time he has already made eight errors, tying him for the league lead among third baseman. The man he is tied with, Mark Reynolds, has played 430 innings at third base this year. Encarnacion has made the same amount of errors as the league leader in 1/3 of the playing time.

Or, if you want to look at it from a fielding percentage standpoint, his mark at third base this year is .784. The next lowest mark of any semi-regular player in baseball is Andy LaRoche at .892. How low is E5’s fielding percentage? Let’s just put it this way – Jose Bautista slugging percentage is higher than Encarnacion’s fielding percentage at third base. Disenchanted with his play at third, the Jays have recently used Encarnacion more at first base; he has the lowest fielding percentage in baseball of any first baseman too.

In 200 innings in the field, he has made 11 errors. A normal everyday position player will rack up about 1,300 defensive innings over the course of the season – at this rate, over a full season, Encarnacion would finish the year with about 70 errors. Seventy.

Teams have been putting up with E5’s defensive issues over the years in order to get his bat into the line-up, but this year, he’s not even providing any offensive value – he’s hitting just .237/.262/.324, he’s without a home run, and he’s decided to just stop walking. His ZIPS projection over the rest of the season is .247/.313/.427, good for a .328 wOBA that would make him roughly a league average hitter.

A league average hitter who is also one of the worst defensive players in baseball is not a Major Leaguer. The Blue Jays have resisted bringing up top prospect Brett Lawrie from Triple-A Las Vegas, in part because his defense at third base is also not very good, but there’s no way the Blue Jays should continue to pencil Encarnacion’s name into the line-up. He’s an absolute disaster in the field, and his bat simply doesn’t even come close to making up for it.

Despite their current three game losing streak, Toronto should have some hopes for contending for the wild-card this year. They’re only four games behind the Red Sox and Yankees, have scored more runs than they’ve allowed, and have the game’s best hitter anchoring a solid line-up. If they patch a few holes and keep their pitchers relatively healthy, the Jays could stay in the race all summer.

If they’re not convinced that Lawrie is ready yet – and remember, Las Vegas is a hitter’s paradise, so you have to deflate his Triple-A numbers by a good amount – they should still be able to find a competent alternative at third base. There’s no reason that the Jays should continue to put up with a never-ending series of errors from one of the worst defenders the sport has seen in a long time.

I think I’m like most baseball fans in that when I think of a designated hitter, I think of home runs. The DH spot has usually been filled by power hitters since its inception in 1973, and that makes sense. If a player is playing a position with no defensive value, he needs to produce on offense. Home runs are the most valuable offensive event. The most valuable hitters in any given year usually have plenty of home runs and extra base hits. One often hears that a player who doesn’t hit for power doesn’t have the bat to play on the “easy end” of the defensive spectrum, and and even moreso in the case of a player who is primarily a DH. Billy Butler is a current example of a player who mostly fills the DH spot, but since he hasn’t hit for much power (yet), you will sometimes hear people say that he doesn’t fit the profile of a DH. Without focusing specifically on Butler, I’d like to write briefly about what it means to “hit well enough to be DH,” and then to see how often that actually happens with a relatively low amount of power.

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In the wake of his demolition of the Twins the previous weekend, last week was apparently the Nerdosphere’s official Jose Bautista Fest. As we bask in the the heat generated by the re-entry of Bautista’s various shots into the left-field seats, it is worth noticing some striking similarities between the mashing Blue Jay’s recent path and that begun just a season earlier by Tampa Bay’s Ben Zobrist. While Bautista is easily the superior hitter, Zobrist is no slouch himself. Beyond the general career parallels, what might make this worth examining is what we might learn about the sort of hitters that can develop power seemingly “out of nowhere” as these two did.

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Since the Chuck Norris meme became mainstream a few years ago, it has inevitably sprung offshoots in different genres, and baseball is no exception. Matt Wieters Facts took off, and more recently, we’ve seen Eric Hosmer Facts.

Well, I’m here to present you with Jose Bautista Facts, but there’s one slight difference – despite being just as crazy, these facts are all true (h/t to DrewGROF on Twitter for noticing this first).

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When the Blue Jays signed Jose Bautista to a five-year, $65 million contract extension before spring training, I said the following:

I get why Toronto made this deal. I think there’s a pretty decent chance he lives up to the contract, even if he’ll likely be perceived as a bust for not repeating his 2010 line each year going forward. However, for me, I’m not sure Toronto got enough of a discount on his expected free agent price to absorb the extra risk of doing this deal now. If my option was take this deal now or let him play out 2011 and re-evaluate at the end of the year, I think I would have waited.

It’s a good thing for Blue Jays fans that I’m not in charge because I would have cost them a lot of money. What’s worse is that I probably would have cost them the chance to keep Bautista in Toronto past this year, because given the start he’s off to this year there’s little chance that the Blue Jays would have been able to re-sign him after this season. The question I want to ask today, though, is just how much did Alex Anthopolous save the Blue Jays with his preemptive strike, signing Bautista before his price went through the roof?

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The Toronto Blue Jays’ 23-year-old outfielder Travis Snider managed to go one-for-four against the Texas Rangers yesterday, extending his hitting streak to five games, but that wasn’t enough to keep him from getting demoted to AAA after the game. Despite the totally meaningful streak, Snider has “hit” .184/.276/.264 (59 wRC+) on the season, although hey, he has stolen 5 bases (look out Tim Raines (51)!). The Blue Jays likely made this move to make room for center fielder Rajai Davis (30), who is coming off of the disabled list today, but Snider wasn’t the only move they could have made, particularly given his age, prospect status, and above all, how early in the season it is. I could just tempt fate and write “sample size sample size sample size,” and that is probably the biggest issue. But is there anything in Snider’s 99 plate appearances so far in 2011 to indicate a problem that requires some time in the minors to work through?

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Among the most talked about story lines heading into the 2011 season, few generated as much interest as Jose Bautista’s attempt to follow up on his monstrous season from last year. The universal consensus was that he would take a step backward, as it was a given he wouldn’t hit 54 home runs again, but the question was just how far back would he go?  Perhaps it’s time to change the question.

Bautista’s ridiculous start to the season – he’s now hitting .359/.506/.750, good for a Major League best .533 wOBA after making just two outs over the course of the three games against the Rays this weekend – has effectively ended any legitimate speculation about whether Bautista’s season was an enormous outlier. He is still doing all of the things that made him so good last year, only now he’s proving that he can do it while hardly seeing any pitches in the strike zone, and his patience has upped his walk rate to elite levels as well.

So, instead of asking just how far Bautista will regress, perhaps the more relevant question now is whether or not Bautista is currently the best hitter in the American League. It’s a question that would have seemed ludicrous 12 months ago, but what Bautista has done since – and done consistently – while adjusting to a changing approach from opposing pitchers has made this a legitimate query.

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In a surprise, the Blue Jays announced yesterday that Jose Bautista would not start at third base this season, but rather in right field. As a result, Edwin Encarnacion slides into the third base slot, and Juan Rivera becomes the team’s designated hitter. In a related move, the team also added Jayson Nix as a reserve infielder. The moves should make for a better defensive alignment for the Jays, and while the timing is a bit wonky, the outcome should not be.
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