In Which Yamaico Navarro Netted the Red Sox Their Two Best Shortstops at LinesMaker

In Which Yamaico Navarro Netted the Red Sox Their Two Best Shortstops

Pedro Ciri­aco impressed once again Sun­day, steal­ing two bases imme­di­ately after enter­ing the game as a pinch-runner and then dou­bling in a run as part of Boston’s 5–1 win over Min­nesota. He’s hit­ting .415/.442/.659 with seven steals in eight attempts this spring. His one homer was a walkoff job against the Mar­lins on March 12.

If you haven’t heard of Ciri­aco, you’re hardly alone. There wasn’t much rea­son to know him until a cou­ple of weeks ago, but now he seems poised to claim a spot on Boston’s bench. Ciri­aco was signed to a minor league deal by the Red Sox on Jan­u­ary 3, three weeks after he was non-tendered by the Pirates.

This is where Yamaico Navarro comes in.

The Red Sox sur­ren­dered Navarro to land Mike Aviles from the Roy­als at the trade dead­line last year. Aviles is now Boston’s start­ing short­stop. The Roy­als, though, quickly soured on Navarro and decided he was the most expend­able player on their 40-man ros­ter when they needed to clear a spot in Decem­ber. As a result, he was traded to the Pirates for two prospects who prob­a­bly won’t ever make the majors, thus mak­ing Ciri­aco expend­able in Pittsburgh.

Of course, Ciri­aco isn’t nearly this good. In fact, he was bru­tal in Triple-A last year, hit­ting .231/.243/.300 in 277 at-bats, and he’s man­aged a .700 OPS just once in seven minor league sea­sons. He is a clear step up from Aviles with the glove, though, and he could be pretty use­ful as a pinch-runner and late-inning defen­sive replacement.

Now, I wouldn’t nec­es­sar­ily expect either Aviles or Ciri­aco to be Red Sox in 2013 and beyond, but it is pretty inter­est­ing to see Boston fill­ing two of its 2012 ros­ter spots with a cou­ple of pieces they only have thanks to a guy the Roy­als took one look at and quickly dismissed.

BetLM's sports betting news features unique sports betting articles as well as current sports news compiled from leading wire services. This arti­cle was dis­trib­uted by Syn­di­cated Sports news wire and aggre­ga­tion ser­vice, For more MLB news see: In which Yamaico Navarro net­ted the Red Sox their two best short­stops.

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