Regarding Stephen Drew

Sort of at random today I happened to be reminded of this article from FanGraphs from back over the offseason, basically wondering out loud why the Mets hadn't yet signed Stephen Drew given their obvious, glaring hole at shortstop in the form of one Ruben Tejada. And I happened to skim over some of the comments (something you can actually do on FanGraphs without wanting to gouge your eyes out afterwards), all of which thought that no matter what reasons the author could come up with why the move wasn't as obvious as everyone thought, it was obvious and Sandy Alderson should just stop making excuses and get it done. So I thought I'd just point the following out:

Ruben Tejada, 2014: .241/.356/.299, 0.7 WAR
Stephen Drew, 2014: .135/.198/.258, -0.4 WAR

Now, in a lot of ways that's unfair to Drew. Since the Mets didn't sign him, and in fact no one signed him until the Red Sox did mid-way through the season, he didn't get to play a normal Spring Training. In a sense these past 27 games in the Majors have been his Spring Training. So he'll probably pick up the pace, especially given his .175 BAbip. Tejada sports a perfectly normal .304 BAbip, although given his traditionally high line drive rates there's reason to think he could go higher than that and he's been hitting really well the past month or two. Tejada does have the better plate discipline numbers, with a 13.9% BB% and a 19.1% K% (although the former is somewhat inflated by intentional walks), while Drew has walked just 7.3% of the time and has whiffed a staggering 31.3% of the time. Drew has more power than Tejada, but if he doesn't start putting the bat on the ball a bit more he'll have trouble hitting replacement level. Oh, and it's also not like this came completely out of nowhere. Here's what Drew did last year in the playoffs for the World Series Champion Red Sox:

.111/.140/.204, 3.5% BB%, 33.3% K%

That's... even worse. At the time I remember the announcers speculating about whether Drew's awful performance would tank his free agent market. It appears to have done so (among actual GMs if not among internet commenters), and, well... so far it doesn't look like that was wrong. As a matter of basic human decency I hope that at some point Drew starts looking like a competent Major Leaguer again, but I gotta say, based on everything that's happened so far this year I would must rather have Ruben Tejada for $1.1 million than Drew for something like three years and $36 million, or even for just one year and $14 million really. This kind of looks like one where Sandy Alderson did the unpopular thing and was completely right in doing so.