I was responding to the use of batting average, which treats singles as a good outcome and treats walks as a non-event. The reason this is bad is that a walk is definitely a good outcome! It gives credit to a good outcome! Noot has the 3rd best OBP on the team this season, incidentally. (Herrera, another player the original poster had downplayed in the past based on BA, leads the team with a phenomenal .381).
Now, of course a walk is not the best outcome, which would be a home run, and isn't as good as a double or triple either. That's why SLG is also a good stat to look. Funny enough, Noot has the 5th best SLG on the team this season.
Even better is combining those two stats, in the form of OPS. Noot is 4th on the team in OPS this season.
Noot is a very good player who can't seem to get a break health-wise. I'd be perfectly fine trading him for a good return. I'd be perfectly fine trading him if we don't intend to compete next season. But if we want to be competitive in 2027 we need to shore up the OF and Noot, even if he's not dependable as an every day player, provides good value in the OF when healthy. If you can get half a season of games out of him that's probably better than what you can find for the same price in the free agent market. It might be an entirely different conversation if we had a ton of OF talent in the system but VS2 has been struggling, Church is not a starting OF on a contending team, and other than Baez we don't really have much relief coming through the pipeline. The biggest need we have is pitching, so if there's going to be any free agent dollars they should go there, which means that unless Noot can bring in at least a middle rotation arm we probably need to keep him as a cost-effective OF solution. And do we really think he could bring in a middle rotation arm with the current premium on pitching and his injury history?
