Community Projection Review: Freddy Sanchez

Well, there's no sugarcoating this one. Doug Froebel did the best, guessing that Sanchez would hit .278/.308/.340. Scoreboard had the third-best guess after posting the second-best guess on the Adam LaRoche projection. Scoreboard is the only person I know of (although there are probably others) who participates in these things who I know isn't a Pirates fan, so maybe that should tell us something. When making his prediction he wrote that Sanchez is "a 30 year old second baseman, for goodness sake."

Well, yeah, and this year Sanchez did what second basemen in their 30s do best: get hurt. Next year, it's probably going to happen again.

Sanchez was quietly brilliant in the second half, playing as a lot of you expected him to play all season. In the first half, he was one of the worst hitters in baseball, hitting .226/.251/.304.

Sanchez was also awful against righties, posting a .637 OPS against them. There are so many possible reasons for his poor performance that it seems silly to try to list them all, but I wonder what role his eye problems played. Sanchez is, of course, a right-handed hitter, and he's had big platoon splits throughout his career, so it's likely I'm making something out of nothing. But when your vision is even a little less than 100%, every split second counts, and I wonder if the extra split second Sanchez got against lefties as a right-handed hitter enabled him to do fairly well against them, while righties just didn't give him quite enough time for his vision to adjust.