I talked about how the Giants should make room on their roster for Fred Lewis a couple days ago, and the team promptly ignored my pleas. Lewis saw the same fate as Kevin Frandsen last night, being dealt to the Toronto Blue Jays for cash or a player to be named later. Now, I'm rather disappointed that the Giants' front office thought they'd be better off with Eugenio Velez, John Bowker and Andres Torres all in favor of Lewis, but I'd like to quickly focus on Toronto's side of the deal.
As I discussed before, Lewis has actually been a pretty good player before and there's little reason to believe that he can't be a league average left fielder over the course of a full season. But for a team whose outfield is seriously lacking athleticism, even with a rejuvenated Vernon Wells, Lewis injects a nice set of tools into the team's roster as well as a hitter who has shown a willingness to take pitches.
He's likely to start on the bench, but the plan here for Toronto seems obvious: they're going to platoon Lewis with Jose Bautista in left field. Bautista is currently the team's left fielder and leadoff hitter, but he has never hit right-handed pitchers in his career. Even while factoring in some regression, both Lewis and Bautista project as above average hitters against right-handers and left-handers, respectively, giving the team a potentially above average combination in left field going forward.
Toronto almost definitely isn't going to continue to play as well as they have so far this season, but they continue to show that they're in a better position than many made them out to be a few months ago. For practically nothing, the Blue Jays managed to get their hands on a useful player with some team control left. Toronto GM Alex Anthopoulos has made a pretty good impression so far in his tenure replacing J.P. Ricciardi, and that should continue with nice moves like this.