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Awful Blue Jays outfield opens door for Cavan Biggio

Through 50 games of the 2019 MLB season, the Toronto Blue Jays have tried just about every type of player you can think of to squeeze a little production out of the outfield slots.

Ten different players have already cycled through the three positions, and calling the results “varying degrees of success” betrays the fact that nearly everyone outside of Randal Grichuk has been mostly terrible when called upon. This idea of multi-positional platoon players hit a nadir on Wednesday, when lineup shuffling in extra innings resulted in utility shortstop Richard Ureña in left field while third baseman Brandon Drury played right. Corner outfielder Billy McKinney being moved to first base at the same time only shed further light on how ridiculous the team’s search for a viable outfielder had become.

Traditional baseball wisdom usually follows something along the lines of, “You have to really be able to hit to handle a corner outfield position,” but the Blue Jays have taken this idea to the opposite extreme. In fact, no team in baseball has gotten less production from right field, where the five players the team has given at-bats to have combined for a league-worst .445 OPS.

For reference, here are the names of the players that have played in the Blue Jays outfield already in 2019: Grichuk, Teoscar Hernandez, Billy McKinney, Socrates Brito, Jonathan Davis, Brandon Drury, Alen Hanson, Anthony Alford, Richard Urena, and Kevin Pillar.

All those names add up to -1.4 Wins Above Replacement, per Baseball Reference, the second worst mark in the league ahead of only the Miami Marlins. It’s not great company.

To Toronto’s credit — if you want to give credit for changing out the very same players they brought in — it hasn’t hesitated to make the jobs available to competition and move on from what isn’t working. Pillar was traded to San Francisco, Brito and Hanson were DFA’d, and Hernandez and McKinney were sent down to Triple-A.

All this is to say: The door is now wide open for Cavan Biggio to stick with the major league club, and the bar for winning a job has never been lower.

For a manager who values positional flexibility as much as Charlie Montoyo appears to — looking at you, Hanson — Biggio profiles as a dream prospect. He’s spent time at five different positions in the minors, and has started regularly moonlighting as an outfielder while tearing up Triple-A pitching this year.

Over 42 games with the Buffalo Bisons, Biggio has a .307/.445/.504 slash line, walking more than striking out while providing plenty of pop. Those numbers will surely go down as the level of pitching goes up, but those following along with the math so far will note that his OPS could drop by 500 points and still be an upgrade over what the team has gotten from the position so far.

Calling up Biggio always made sense at some point for the 2019 team. He’s 24-years-old, so there is no service time concerns, and he showed more than enough in his Buffalo appearances to have earned taking a crack at solving the problem in the Blue Jays outfield.

He’ll get his first shot at doing so on Friday night at home against the San Diego Padres.

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