Vargas impresses; Defense does not

Same shit story, different day, right? It's starting to become really frustrating to watch the 2009 Mariners turn close games into blow outs! It happened again last night with Jason Vargas pitching a solid 5 innings, giving up 5 hits, 1 run (on the Chris Davis homer), 2 walks and 3 strikeouts. Not too shabby for your first major league start in 2 years and frankly he exceeded all of my expectations against a dangerous Texas lineup.

I'm going to beat this defense topic into the ground yet again. Our outfield defense is amazing, our middle infield however, has become a liability. In the 7th inning of last night's game Yuni again botched another play up the middle on a ball hit by Andruw Jones. The play should have been made and the only reason he wasn't charged with an error on his off-target throw was the fact the Rangers were the home team and the bookkeeper wanted to boost Jones' average.

Let's take a look at the UZR of our two middle infielders Betancourt and Lopez courtesy of fangraphs.com. Remember, UZR is a way to measure how many runs a player contributes or gives up based on the balls they either reach or fail to get to compared to the rest of the players at that position.

Let's start with Yuni. Our shortstop has cost the Mariners -6.4 runs per game based on his defense. Shortstop, arguably the most important defensive position is not a place to be giving up 6.4 runs in 32 games. It may be time to see what Ronny Cedeno can do in the 6-hole.

Lopez, although playing not as poorly as Betancourt, has a UZR of -1.5 based on his defense. And the argument for Lopez was that he more than makes up for his lack of defense or focus with his bat. Well, looking at Jose's offensive stats you'll see he's hitting .248/.289/.360. That's a .248 average, .289 on-base percentage and a .360 slugging percentage. Not exactly setting the world on fire.

Back to defense, this means between our two starting middle infielders they have given up nearly 8 runs! It is absolutely inexcusable for a pair of professional middle infielders to give up a combined 8 runs. So, it's little wonder why when horrible defense up the middle is paired with a flailing offense we can't pull out wins in close games, or prevent close games to becoming blow-outs.

This problem has been occurring for the last three years and it's time to be addressed. How Zduriencik and Wakamatsu take care of this situation however is rather limited. You can't bench both players because the only utility infielder on the team is Cedeno. And you can't trade both of them, so the question remains, If you had to choose between keeping Yuni or Lopez, who would you keep?