Whither Freddy?

Cruelly felled by the now chic oblique strain, the rest of Freddy's season is in doubt. Verily, the rest of his career may be teetering on the abyss. Or not. EMS cannot and will not predict the future though we will offer easily deniable and hardly plausible guesses. Does Freddy have a future? Lets examine some earlier beta versions of the fast as hell, though slappy hitting prototype. For the sake of clarity we will refer to these previous releases as Winn and Roberts.

Bouncing back and forth like Pong between the minors and the big club in Tampa*, Winn logged 800 semi sporadic ab's in the three seasons after debuting as a 23/4 year old in 1998. When he emerged as a regular Devil Ray (Though I imagine most Devil Rays prefer to think of themselves as special Devil Rays) in 2001 he was pushing 27. He posted modest but respectable numbers. His ops was .740. By 2002 he became the player he is now. He is good enough, or his agent is good enough to be playing under a nice 3 year deal for millions of clams. Still, after 800 ab's Winn's career ops was under 700. From humble beginnings, yada yada yada...

Speaking of humble, Roberts was damn near invisible in his 20's. He popped up in Cleveland when he was 27 posting a forgettable ops of .589 in 143 ab's. After that he spent an extended sabbatical in Palookaville before becoming a semi regular, as some sort of penance, I suppose, with the Dog Poopies at age 30. He has proudly not hit much ever since but his one parlor trick has convinced Sabes that he simply must give him several million bucks and he must do it now.

Freddy's small sample size legacy doesn't appear to be a whole lot different in scope and range to both Winn and Roberts. I don't know how much scope Freddy has but he does possess good range. That is a bonus because he takes really weird routes toward fly balls. Anyhoo, Freddy clocks in with a .739 career ops total after his initial 101 official ab's. Can't tell much from that, can we? Winn is a steady big league performer and he's at .767. Roberts quietly chips in at .711. That the Giants have essentially three different versions of the same model can't be tossed off as coincidence. There is a plan, man..

* We know that referring to the Tampa Bay Devil Rays as a big league team stretches credulity like spandex on Livan, but if we are going to claim the same distinction for the 07 Giants we have to be flexible with our standards.