I knew what you meant, but thanks for clarifying.
I guess I'm not sure how Brennan being the 4th OFer works. Most of the pitching hitters face is RHed. Straw and OGon have reverse splits. Tito specifically stated that he has spoken with Josh about getting some reps in RF again too and I'm not sure how to assess that because he has been terrible vs LHP.
I agree that having young players sit for long periods of time is not ideal. It sucks actually, but what are they to do? Tito has to find reps and balance the playing time of Rosario, Miller, Freeman and Arias in the IF as well as all the OFers. I expect Rosario to be dealt, Gimenez to slide over to SS and for Freeman, Miller and Arias battle it out for playing time. Should Arias win out then Gimenez can remain at 2B. If Miller or Freeman win out then they take over 2B while Andres is our SS.
We have a lot of offseason left so some of these guys might not even be a factor by opening day.
I don't really see OGon as a reverse splits guy (if you look at 2021 stats they tell the opposite story where he obliterated lefties). Yeah I'd weight 2022 more heavily because it's the majors but if I had to bet, he will at least be a neutral guy the rest of the way.
This is mainly important because Brennan is NOT a neutral guy by any concept of the word. He has shown much better success, consistently, against righties than lefties. I'm just making up numbers but if someone's a 120 vs RHP and 80 vs LHP you can easily platoon them with the guy who is 100 against both.
We've got a lot of guys who have reverse splits problems. Maybe they are young and just haven't faced many lefties yet but some of them even have had problems with lefties in the minors (not OGon at least, but Arias and Miller for instance). Maybe with enough reps these lefty problems would subside but I feel like this might be a bit of a development problem with how we're working on our hitters. Maybe it's less us and more San Diego though given how Arias, Miller, and Naylor share that link in common.
It's just hard for me to believe that we have all these guys who can't hit lefties, and a lot of them are righties. It's very bizarre. Meanwhile Gimenez and Rosario, who came up through the Mets system, have better platoon splits against lefties than expected; Gimenez is about neutral despite hitting lefty and Rosario has a huge platoon advantage.
Removing the shift should increase the percentage of lefty hitters and over time I imagine the lefty pitchers will catch up so I hope we have some sort of solution to this...
------------------------End of rant about splits, and hitting lefties------------------------
Onto Naylor playing RF I think it's a similar consideration as with Brennan. I do believe that there is a possibility that OGon is seen as someone who has the potential of being a platoon guy. Hopefully that's not the case and 2021 OGon is only the beginning but who knows...
The thing is with all these young guys it's very hard to project their careers, so many of them will clear themselves out of the picture and we might trade others. So having more options is just going to be a better thing in general but given the existence of Valera it does seem weird that we would be looking at Naylor (a bad OF but good 1B) as someone who needs to get more time there. Although reps could potentially make him a better OF. I also know that
@sportscoach mentioned something about OF actually being easier on the ankle so maybe for his health too.
Another guy is Noel. I see him as more of a 2024 guy but he might fit into the mix somewhere at some point. Having too many options is not a bad thing, we can keep rotating them around if they fail for long enough.