Julio Lugo is back in our lives.
Get used to it.
Lugo, who flashed doubles power and was one of the better offensive shortstops in the game before inking a contract with the Red Sox is returning to try to recapture his former glory — glory that has been in short supply. In fact, the only glory in a Sox uniform I can think of for Lugo is when he capped off the Mother’s Day Miracle… and that was due to an error by Chris Ray.
In Lugo’s two years in Boston, he’s combined for a lovely .237/.314/.343 line.
Not exactly worth the millions he was paid, was it?
Okay, so that does short shrift to Lugo. If you throw out his disastrous first half in 2007, he’s hit for a cumulative .274/.339/.368. Is that good enough to escape our ire?
Well, no. But it’s enough to make him less damning.
Part of Lugo’s appeal was his fantastic range at short. That range hasn’t disappeared, but the errors were out in force in 2008, as it was for much of his career save 2007.
While the pecking order clearly deliniates Lugo as the starting shortstop over Nick Green, it will be hard for Lugo to justify starting full-time over Green, at least in the outset. Sure, Tito will probably hide behind the fact that Lugo needs to get his feet wet, be brought along slowly, etc. etc. etc. But Nick Green has been very, very impressive.
Through Sunday’s capper against the Yankees, Green was hitting .302/.375/.488 While this is with a .355 BABIP (through Saturday’s games), BABIP for a hitter is not as tried and true as it is for a pitcher. (All pitchers can tend to normalize around .300.)
eBABIP and xBABIP tell a better story, and Green’s expected BABIP is .339. (xBABIP is not calculable at the moment for someone with inferior math skills just as myself.)
He also has a 21.9 percent line drive percentage, similar to his 21.3 percentage over his career.
All this is a convoluted way to say that right now, both offensively and defensively, Nick Green has been better than Lugo ever was in a Sox uniform.
Green was hot in ST, and I cant decide if its just a continuance of that, playing against inferior competition and just building confidence to this point, or if he made an adjustment we don’t know about. Historically, evidence would lead to the latter. There have, however, been players who suddenly figured things out (like Melvin Mora)… is Green one of those?
At this moment, no one knows.
But we are definitely about to find out if Lugo can fend off Green.