They Call Him G.I Jones.....

.... because he belongs in a platoon. I know I know he is our biggest power threat, and we don't have the other half of the platoon. Well we do have that other half but he is currently injured. This post is more for next year anyway. That other half is Steven Pearce, in case you were wondering.

I think we've gotten a long enough look at both that we can discern their strengths and weaknesses.

First off Jones belongs at the ML level. There is little doubt about that. He is a good enough fielder at first base and has the speed and versatility to move to RF in a pinch. He has crushed righties over the course of his career, posting a very good .911 OPS. Sadly against lefties he has been pretty poor overall this is evidenced by his .224 BAA and his terrible .665 OPS. It's because of these splits that he has a pretty average .830 OPS.

This season alone, his OPS is .786 well below what this team needs out of that position.

Thankfully he has a polar opposite. Steven Pearce has struggled a decent amount in the big leagues, his .706 career OPS in nowhere near good enough to warrant a full time job, but what makes him particularly attractive to me is his splits. Even though he has had less success in the big leagues than Jones thus far, he is even better against lefties than Jones is against righties. His avg. is barely higher (.304 to .303) but his slugging pct is almost .30 points higher. A platoon in this situation makes almost too much sense to ignore.

Wouldn't it make a ton of sense to take Jones' average .830 OPS and turn that into a platoon with an OPS of around .920? I know it's unpopular to think that Jones should see the bench, but this is the correct move to make an immediate impact next season, if Pearce recovers fully.