Before the season started if you were to make the case for using Wilmer Flores at shortstop you would say he looked sort of okay defensively, he makes good contact and he showed in September with regular playing time that he could be an asset offensively. Besides, no one really wanted to see Ruben Tejada as the team’s starter. Since no move was made to bring in another shortstop, it was Flores almost by default.

Fast forward to the beginning of May. On the first day of the month he made an error in the field and had a Golden Sombrero at the plate. On the second day he got a day off and speculation was that he would get the next day off, too. Meanwhile, Tejada made a play in the field in the sixth inning Saturday that Flores may not have made, potentially saving two runs.

Is the “Flores as starting shortstop” experiment on its last legs?

Offensively, Flores has put up numbers almost identical to his ones from a year ago. In 274 PA last year, Flores had a .265 BABIP, a .664 OPS and a .291 wOBA. In 80 PA in 2015, those numbers are .268, .665 and .295, respectively. On the plus side, his ISO is 20 points higher in 2015. But that’s negated by the fact that he’s walking less – yes, he’s down from 2014’s 4.4 BB% to a 2.5 mark today – and striking out nearly twice as often as a year ago. Flores always had low K% rates in the minors but after a month of action, his strikeout rate sits at 20%.

Wally Backman said of Flores: “He’s the best RBI guy I’ve ever managed. He can have some ugly at-bats at times, but he’s absolutely big in RBI situations.” According to Baseball-Reference, Flores has the same number of RBIs (8) with his number of PA (80) as the average MLB player this year. The only difference is the average MLB player comes up with 47 runners on base in this amount of playing time, with 23 in scoring position. Flores has come up with 62 runners on base and with 33 of them in scoring position. Baseball Musings has him with an 8.06 OBI%, the ninth-worst mark in the majors among guys who’ve come up with 50 runners on base this season.

Last year the advanced defensive numbers were split on Flores. UZR saw him as a plus fielder while DRS saw the exact opposite. In just 183 innings, both systems this year see him as slightly negative. Flores is among the league leaders with seven errors but just as importantly are the plays he’s not making and not getting debited with an error.

Inside Edge fielding numbers on FanGraphs break down plays by how likely they are to be made by all fielders at a position. There are six categories, with the two easiest being “Routine,” ones where 90-100% are made and “Likely,” were 60-90% are made. Flores does okay in these two categories – 92.3% in Routine and 75% in Likely. It’s the other four where he has trouble. There are 10 balls hit to Flores that fall outside Routine or Likely and he hasn’t recorded a single out on these.

So, he’s making errors at an alarming rate, he’s having no success in plays that aren’t likely, he’s not hitting any better than a year ago and he’s not taking advantage of numerous RBI situations. You can live with Flores’ defensive output if he hits like one of the top offensive shortstops in the league. Last year eight full-time shortstops posted a wRC+ of 100 or more, a decent cut-off for the top offensive players at the position.

Flores is not far from that mark now and one could easily argue that he deserves more of a shot.

But is it wishful thinking that additional plate appearances are going to prove Flores to be an MLB-caliber hitter? People like to point to what he did last September, when he put up an .813 OPS over 96 PA as what he’s capable of doing. But most of that damage was done in a four-game stretch, where he had eight hits, including three homers, in 15 ABs. In nine games before then he had a .511 OPS and in 10 games afterwards he had a .650 OPS (with a .324 BABIP).

Similarly, he had a five-game stretch in 2015 where he batted .421 and hit three homers. Outside of those five games, he’s batting .179 with more whiffs (14) than hits (10) this season.

Many people will dismiss that line of thinking because of the sample size issue. But at some point, the sample sizes stop being small. We all agree that a .665 OPS over 80 PA is a small sample. But how would you categorize a .664 OPS over 354 PA? Or a .637 OPS over 455 PA? Those are not so easily written off.

At some point, you want to stop throwing away PA on a guy who isn’t producing. It’s no different than with Chris Young in 2014 or Ike Davis in 2013 or Jason Bay in 2012. The Mets gave that trio 879 PA and should have only given them about half that amount.

Many people are seduced with the numbers that Flores put up in Triple-A. But once we take the appropriate air out of them, we see that they just aren’t that impressive. In 2014, Flores had a .367 OBP and a .568 SLG mark in Las Vegas. Research indicates that you should remove 19% from a player’s OBP and 34% from their slugging in moving from Las Vegas to Queens. Once we do that with Flores’ 2014 PCL numbers, we get a .297 OBP and a .375 SLG. That’s a pretty good match for what he’s doing today (.278/.387).

At some point, we have to say that this is who Flores is as a hitter. Before the season started, my take was that it was worth giving Flores six weeks to show us something. It hasn’t been quite six weeks but he hasn’t shown us much worthwhile, either.

Do you give him another month? And what do you do if at the end of May neither his hitting nor defense has improved to any appreciable degree? Do you just insert Tejada and make Flores the reserve? Or do you demote Flores so he can play every day and call up Matt Reynolds for a shot?

If it’s me the experiment ends now, Tejada is installed as the shortstop and a full-court press is put on teams willing to move a top-notch player at the position. And it makes no difference if you carry Flores or Reynolds as your backup shortstop, as neither are starting-caliber players at the position in the majors. Whichever one you think has more trade value should be starting every day in Las Vegas.

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