Bear with me here, I’ll be going over one of the bigger off season issues for the Jays, which is what’s going on at 1st and DH.

The Jays need more extra base power (preferably HR) from these two positions. It could be argued that they also need more HR power from the hot corner, but with Rolen locked in little is expected to change.

Two of the more substantial off-season rumors have been the possible trading of Lyle Overbay and the free agent acquisition of a DH (with Milton Bradley’s name most frequently mentioned). Before we jump into all of that I decided to look at Lyle Overbay’s splits.

Lyle’s vs RH, vs LH splits have been discussed ad nauseam across the numerous Jays sites, so I’m going to attempt to deviate from the norm here.

Below are two “spinners”, Spinners graphically show what a batter’s output is in percentage (%) terms during his at-bats. We use plate appearances and then calculate out the percentage of singles, doubles, triples, HR, BB+HBP (both will get you to first base without putting the ball in play) and outs (including flyouts, groundouts, strikeouts, ROE, SH & SF).

Here are the spinners, one representing Lyle vs RH and the other vs LH during the 2008 season.

Overbay vs RH

(Quick Note: All outs are counted in the outs column, including SF (sac fly) and SH (sac hit). SF are factored in to the OBP, so we’ll see a slight variation between OBP and a spinner out %).

This doesn’t look too bad. The out % is 61.5% and we see a decent level of extra base power from Lyle’s 26 2B, 2 3B & 14 HR.

Overbay vs LH

The out % jumps up near 72%. Again, this number differs from OBP but still, 72% of the time Overbay comes to the plate vs LH he’s an out. Awful. Oddly his % of 1B is roughly the same, at 15% of plate appearances. But bye-bye to an extra base power, with Lyle’s vs RH HR % (green in first chart) being greater than his combined extra base production vs LH.

Ok, so we’ve proved the point that we already knew coming in, which is Overbay vs LH should be a no-go in 2009. I realized it was bad but not to this extent. Yet, based upon the spinner’s I would be inclined to keep Overbay around to face RH pitching.

So, where should the Jays go from here? I guess that leaves us with a platoon situation.

Over the next week here at mopupduty.com we’ll run some vs LH spinners for some of the cheaper options on the FA market and players on the Jays current 40 man roster.