I hope he doesn’t. At this point I’d rather see a team that can actually use him give him a shot than have him waste his career away with us…

It’s quite easy. First, in the PT he has gotten, he’s performed more than adequately. Second, taking his salary into account, he gives us lots of surplus value. Third, he has definitely not been given a “fair run” – and your argument in favor of that is based on a baseline of what we do with our other prospects….who get an even less “fair” chance than Fred….well, we’re mismanaging all of them.

The bottom line is this – Fred Lewis is a 2+ WAR player if given a full year of playing time – making him a roughly average starter, while making the minimum. Given that we really, really desperately need contributors in ourl ineup, it seems that an average starter making the minimum could really help. Instead we play clearly inferior players like Velez over him. We sign bums like Huff for $3M to knock Lewis out of the lineup, when we could play Lewis (a better player than Huff) for the league minimum….I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. It’s a losing strategy.

Your points are certainly valid, and I’ve had my own questions about the Ishikawa projection, but I think you’re off to say the chances of Ishikawa being better than Huff are a longshot. I did some more looking into the projections, and from what I can tell it seems like Ishi’s put up some decent minor league lines recently, which is probably why the projection is so high. My completely unscientific guess is that his expected production going forward is something like a 98-99 wRC+, which is just splitting the difference between his CHONE projection and his career MLB line. Even with a 98 wRC, Ishikawa is a couple of runs better than Huff’s projections….and going back to your original point – projections are just estimates of a distribution, so of course there’s a reasonable chance Huff ends up better, but the projection is telling us there’s a better chance Ishikawa outproduces him….