While we have some holes in the lineup, a platoon involving Luplow should not be one of them. Surely Tito can find ONE left hand bat that can regularly hit righties.
Luplows career OPS vs lefties is .982.
To put that into some perspective, perhaps the two best RH bats the Indians have had in the past half century...maybe longer... are Manny and Albert Belle. Their respective OPS vs lefties were 1.060 and 1.012.
Luplow isn't either, obviously, but vs lefties he is close, and its no longer a small sample size.
If Tito can find one left hand bat who can put up an .780 OPS vs righties, we have a RF platoon that should put up an OPS of .840.
That is plus production in RF. Over the last two seasons, only eight RFs have put up more than .840 OPS.
How about Naylor platooning in right with Luplow? CDAV said he heard Tito say on a recent podcast that Naylor is an outfielder and first base will be manned by Bradley or Bauers. Since Rosario hits lefties and righties equally well and is getting $8 million I assume he'll be in left every day, which means Naylor is in right field since he won't be in center.
Rosario in left and a Luplow/Naylor platoon in right has a very good chance of giving us an OPS of .800+ at both corners. Then it comes down to whether we can find a halfway decent bat between Mercado and Zimmer in center and between Bradley and Bauers at first.
I don't see how the overall outfield production can possibly be the same or worse than last year considering the additon of Rosario. But a bounce back year from Mercado would go a long way. Daniel Johnson and Nolan Jones could also be factors in the second half.
Yeah, Luplow is Brandon Guyer on steroids only without all those hit-by-pitches.
We really need bounce back seasons at the dish from Mercado and Berto, along with somebody to do better than Santana's .199/.699 at first base and match Lindor's .750 OPS at short.
We need Quantrill or somebody else to replace Cookie's 2.91 ERA or at least be in the ballpark. Despite the very low ERA the Indians were 6-6 when Carrasco started thanks to a horrible offense. If the offense improves we can still go .500 in those games even if the ERA isn't as low.
Clase needs to replace Hand in the bullpen which is a tall order. Or Karinchak replaces Hand and Clase replaces Karinchak.
So I think the key players this year are Clase, Quantrill, Mercado, the new shortstop (Rosario or Gimenez), the new first baseman (Bradley or Bauers), and Aaron Civale, whose ERA went from 2.34 in 2019 to 4.74 last year in 12 starts last year.
Tristan McKenzie needs to take the next step. Last year with the bases empty opposing batters had an OPS of .491. With runners on it was .826. McKenzie needs to improve his ability to pitch from the stretch with his attention divided. However, with RISP he held hitters to 1-for-10, suggesting that when he didn't have to worry about holding runners and could focus on the hitter he was fine.