- Image by slgckgc via Flickr
It’s always exciting to have a highly touted prospect make his Major League debut. That’s happening tonight for Ike Davis and the Mets. Unfortunately, it comes at the expense of Tobi Stoner getting optioned back to Triple-A Buffalo. But Mike Jacobs is the one that really paid the price by losing his position.
Much has been written about Davis and we’ll all be following his progress closely in the coming weeks. You can read a good summary about Davis’ stats at Fangraphs. But they threw in a line at the end that’s critical and we’ll get back to that in a minute. Even Beyond the Box Score chipped in with an opinion on the Davis promotion today. Their take is that this is another example of the Mets rushing their best prospects a la Jenry Mejia and Fernando Martinez.
My take is that Davis’ promotion today is all about MLB service time. It’s no coincidence that today is the first day that teams can promote players to the majors with no chance of getting enough service time to qualify for a full season. That means the Mets can control Davis through 2016 as opposed to 2015. This is also posted by MLBTradeRumors today.
Although I wrote a month ago that the Mets would realize that their best first baseman was at Triple-A, it’s a shrewd move to hold him off until today. Hopefully, we’ll be thanking Omar Minaya in six years that he did hold Davis off for a few weeks to get the extra year out of him.
The big question is: if Davis is successful what do they do with Daniel Murphy? I’m sure he’s wondering the same thing tonight.
The Mets Report 
Obviously when you have a player like Ike you use him and worry about what you're going to do with Murphy later. But really I think they'd be best using Murphy off the bench. This bench doesn't have a lot of pop and adding Murphy to it will really help.
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Rob, I agree that Ike Davis should be playing. But I'm not so sure that they'll want to turn Murphy into a bench player. He just turned 25 years old. You don't usually see guys that young coming off the bench. Honestly, I don't know what to do with him if he isn't in Buffalo.
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I'm sure Murphy has known what his role would be if/when Ike came up. I think he would add some much needed depth to a weak bench.Or…. Can Murphy play second base?
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You don't see too many 25-year old guys as strictly bench players. I'd be surprised if they did that with Murphy. And I'd be covering my eyes if he was playing second base anytime a ball was hit in his direction.
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