Terry Francona: Jacoby Ellsbury to Start in Left Field

They just listen to us

but I could be wrong.

not sure how to respond to that. As Drew is one of the better defensive RFs in the game. His UZR/150 last year was 15.7.

He glides out there.

for every reason listed.

Love it.

(1) No one has to "remember" that players are "real people." Nobody has said otherwise.
(2) So what if Ellsbury is unhappy? I’m sure Mike Lowell isn’t happy about losing his job in Boston. He also isn’t too happy about maybe having to learn a new position: 1B. Ells has played both corner OF positions before. He has 1956.1 innings in CF and 777.1 innings in LF/RF, which breaks down to Ells playing roughly a third of his pro innings away from CF.
(3) Baseball is a team game. Players like Lowell and Ellsbury understand that baseball teams will do what they think is best in order to win. Basically, Jacoby Ellsbury isn’t like your 11-year old. If he is, the Sox have a huge problem. Ells should understand that the Sox acquired Mike Cameron because he has been a top CF for years.
(4) By all accounts, Mike Lowell is a valued member of the Sox clubhouse. Should the Sox start Lowell just because he is a "team leader," great for team chemistry, or whatever cliché you want to use? No. Beltre is an upgrade over Lowell at 3B, just as Cameron is an upgrade over Ells in CF. Ellsbury is far better than Jason Bay in LF.
(5) Cameron isn’t a retread. Nor is it relevant how many teams he has played on. Players switch teams. It’s a fact of modern baseball. Randy Johnson just retired. He’s a likely first-ballot HOFer—and he played on 6 teams in his career, one fewer than Mike Cameron.
(6) UZR merely measures how many balls hit into a zone are turned into outs and rates the players based on averages for that position. Whether your eyes tell you Ells is a great fielder or not, the Sox didn’t make as many outs in CF as they should have last year. (BTW, my eyes tell me Ells wasn’t very good last year). People really have to get over their fear of certain stats, especially since most people quote stats to evaluate baseball players. They just use different numbers.

Let’s look at the facts: Boras client in a team with a backload of outfield prospects, with the best (Westmoreland) due to arrive when Ells is up for free agency. He’s been a good but not great offensive producer whose main draw (steals) is both overvalued AND matched by his future competition (Westmoreland has elite speed and was something like 20:0 SB:CS in Lowell). His problems on defense are in an area that is not easily fixed (getting bad reads) and have been acknowledged not only by the stat geeks, but by pretty much everyone not part of the mainstream media. It passes the eye test—he gets bad reads on balls, which cost him a good portion of the short time he has to get where he’s going.

I’m not saying that the writing is on the wall with Ellsbury, but I don’t think he’s such a definite fixture of the future that we should be weakening the team to “invest” as it were. I expect his fielding isn’t as bad as all that—probably closer to average, having either had a particularly bad or unlucky year—but it’s just not that good. And he’s not that important to the Red Sox organization’s future.

People say that UZR needs a few years for the sample size to get big enough to trust. But, unfortunatley, its looking like Ells sucks in CF.