Rick Ankiel numbers

Today we have been seeing some buzz around the Mets acquiring Rick Ankiel. The Mets have been looking for a left handed bench bat and Rick Ankiel is purportedly near the top of the list. This is a tough call for me, I actually really like Rick Ankiel, I think he is a fun player to watch, he appears to be a pretty gritty, hard worker and he has an awesome baseball story. That being said, his numbers make him a hard sell.

Offensively he is at best average and at worst a bit below, he appeared in 122 games in 2011 and hit .239/.296/.363, he also truck out 96 times in just 380 at bats, which mean he strikes out about 25% of the time. The big selling point of Ankiel has been his defense and powerful outfield arm, but unfortunately his defense has not blown me away either.

His career UZR is -3.1 which means he is worse defensively than an average bench player. His numbers last year provide some comfort but still not much. Below are his UZR numbers for each outfield position.

Position	UZR
RF	-1.4
CF	6.9
LF	5.5

He has decent numbers in both left and center, however not high enough to discount for his bad bat. If a guy is going to play solely based on defense, I would prefer to see higher and more consistent defensive numbers than these.