Julio Lugo - Waste of Space?
I never thought I would say this, but bring back Edgar Renteria! OK, probably not since he didn’t want to be here and Lugo actually does, but still. Lugo has not gotten a hit since June 14 (though he has been close - as if that counts) and has only 7 in the month. Compare that to Dustin Pedroia’s 24, who was the team under-performer before Lugo.
His average in June is .094, which is unbelievably bad. His season average is down to .193 after being at a high of .333 on April 16 (yes, he actually was hitting .300 for a total of 7 days this year). Its not that he’s just not hitting either. He isn’t getting on base at all! He has stolen 4 bases, which is almost decent for a month, but his OBP in June is still well below .200, bringing his season total down to .258. This is downright awful.
So what do you do? Well, inter-league play is over so you can hit him 9th every day and hopefully he’ll only get 3-4 at bats. You give him more days off by playing Alex Cora. But what you don’t do is bench him. Remember this:
Julio Lugo can’t be benched
It doesn’t matter that he can’t hit anything. With the contract they gave him, they are committed. Lugo has talent, he just doesn’t know where it is now. This guy is a career .270 hitter so he’ll have to at least partially turn it around at some point. He was brought here to be the lead-off hitter that Coco Crisp is not, and now Coco is back up there.
He has to come around at some point. Thankfully, the rest of the team is playing well right now and he can be overlooked. He will probably continue to struggle, but we can only hope that once a couple guys go cold in August, that Lugo can be the one to carry the team for a couple weeks. At least I hope he will.
Stumble it!