When Daniel Murphy strained his quad last week, many speculated that Matt Reynolds would be getting the call to replace him. Instead, the Mets recalled Danny Muno, drawing the ire of some fans.
In his previous two big league stints, Muno was 1 for 15 with no runs batted it, no extra base hits, and 8 strikeouts. Frankly, the 26-year-old has looked lost against big league pitching. In his first start since returning, Muno went 1 for 4 with an infield single while also grounding into a double play. With the young infielder slashing .105/.190/.296, the question remains; why not Reynolds?
The simple answer is that Muno is already on the 40-man roster, in order to call up Reynolds the Mets would need to put someone on waivers. So let’s introduce a new question; why not Muno?
In the worst case scenario the Mets would lose Muno, and with what we’ve seen so far, that wouldn’t seem to be a catastrophic outcome. In a more likely scenario however, Muno would clear waivers and have the opportunity to return to Triple-A Las Vegas.
In either case the Mets don’t have much to lose, so why not pull the trigger? Matt Reynolds has slashed .281/.342/.756 with 3 homeruns and 35 RBI. While Daniel Murphy nurses his quad the left-to-right starting infield would be Reynolds-Flores-Tejada-Duda. This would finally give the team some infield consistency, at least for the short term.
While Reynolds hasn’t played third base in the minors, it was his fulltime position at Arkansas. Having watched both Ruben Tejada and Eric Campbell man the hot corner, could Reynolds really be worse?
