Last night, I had a few discussions with the guys over at DRaysBay and Rays of Light about Ben Zobrist and his performance last year. I was making the argument that I wasn’t impressed because his big league numbers – particularly in the walks/strikeouts departments – were so far off from his minor league numbers. At the end of the day, I am willing to withhold judgment on him until after he’s played a couple of months this year, now that the job is his to lose. I was curious, though, to see if I could find any established, decent-quality shortstops from recent years that had similarly bad starts and turned it around into something good.

I actually found 2 guys who also started out pretty poorly before turning into solid (if unspectacular) major leaguers:

Gary DiSarcina
Jay Bell

Now, let’s be honest, do either Gary DiSarcina or Jay Bell turn the Rays into pennant contenders? Of course not. But there are plenty of worse shortstops out there (I’m looking at you, Cristian Guzman!) than those two. I would be ECSTATIC if Zobrist turned out to have the honest, workman-like career that either of those two had.

Do you have a penny or two you’d like to toss into the discussion? Feel free to comment or shoot me an email!