Keppinger’s playing great right now. The knock on Keppinger has always been his defense, and as far as I know, his glove hasn’t improved significantly. He is playing SS now, which might imply an improvement, but he’s playing SS on a team coached by Dusty Baker, so who knows what the hell is going on over there.

Over the past 3 years, Grudzielanek has batted .297, .302, and is now batting .312. But he’s done all that with almost no power, no speed, and few walks. Castillo’s numbers over the past few years have been roughly equivalent. Lower slugging, higher OBP, more steals. Defensively, they’re both very good.

Castillo’s not the problem yet. If in another month or two, he’s batting .240 with a sub .700 OPS, he’ll start being a problem. But we didn’t have any better options, and I’ll take Castillo over Gotay’s inability to play defense any day.

Gotay was just last year’s Angel Pagan. A mediocre player who happened to hit a hot streak.

He passed on Grudzelanek who likely would be in his 3rd productive year for us if we’d picked him up in 2006 or 2nd productive year if we’d grabbed him before last season.

They traded Keppinger for Gotay and then cut Gotay loose.

Castillo is the 4th most productive out of that group and we’re stuck with this guy for 3 more years. Insane.

Utley, Orlando Hudson. Dan Uggla, too. Brandon Phillips, definitely, and Jeff Kent.

At least, those are the only guys who are proven enough to beat Castillo’s consistent mediocrity at the plate and high quality defense. And I’m still not entirely sold on Uggla.

This isn’t to say that Castillo’s great, just that most 2nd basemen kinda suck.

i do think we should generally play with an extra reliever. but with castillo down, and easley at second, we have no backup for reyes, and we only have one bench guy with any pop. easley can’t play every innning every day. he’s great, but old. we need another middle infielder.