Better know your Blue Jays 40-man: Freddy Galvis

The Blue Jays big free agent signing of the winter (well, our big signing is Galvis or Shoemaker. I keep hoping they will decide on Harper). I would have never figured we’d be signing a middle infielder, we are so deep in middle infielders. Why would we need another? I still don’t know.

Freddy Galvis is a 29-year-old switch hitter. He’s been in the majors for 7 years, 6 with the Phillies and last year with the Padres. Career he has a .246/.290/.374 line. He’s been pretty consistent, his last 4 seasons, his 4 full seasons, he had OPS numbers of .645, .673, .690 and .680. His batting numbers don’t make you think ‘full-timer’, it kind of makes you think ‘Ryan Goins’ (well, slightly better than that, but not much).

His value is pretty much all on defense. Over the past four seasons he’s had UZR/150 numbers of 1.8, 14.8, 3.2 and -3.8. Freddy is going to be much better on defense than Lourdes Gurriel, but then Gurriel has room to improve.

He steals some bases, 47 in the last four years, with 18 times caught. Over the last four seasons FanGraphs has his base running numbers at 4.4, 1.0, 0.9 and 0.1. Considering most of our Jays were in the negatives over the last few years, Freddy will look like Billy Hamilton out there.

And, while we are looking at the last four years he’s had fWARs of 1.6, 2.3, 1.6 and 1.2.

What’s his role on the team?

At first I figured he’d be a utility infielder/defensive replacement/shortstop for ground ball pitchers, but, listening to what the team is saying, it sounds like he’ll be the everyday shortstop with Lourdes playing more second and other spots. Montoyo was talking about playing Devon Travis in left field on occasion.

I’d imagine, since his bat isn’t great, that his playing time will drop as the season goes on. It is easy to say that you want to improve the defense, but it is tougher to deal with a bad bat in the lineup as the season goes on. But I’m thinking he’s going to get a lot of playing time at the start of the season.

Galvis is the active leader in consecutive games played. He’s played 325 straight games.

After Cal Ripken’s streak, I figured managers wouldn’t allow players to get a long streak going (not that Galvis has any chance of catching Cal). Cal’s streak showed how these things can make life tougher on the manager. His manager couldn’t take him out for a day to let him rest. Managers got smarter and started making sure guys didn’t get a long streak going.

Not that Freddy is at that point.

I’m wondering how long his streak will last with the Jays?

Let’s do a poll: