Branyan to the rescue

So the well-known strikeout machine Russell Branyan is back in Cleveland, this time with the promise of a regular job. Scandal! Horror! How could we give daily at-bats to this train wreck of a free swinger? Don't we remember what a failure he was? ... Or so the thinking seems to go among many Indians fans.

I'm not going to sit here and claim the 34-year-old Branyan is the second coming of Lou Gehrig. Or even Andre Thornton. And when you look at the numbers baseball people have traditionally looked at — .234 career average, 164 career home runs against 946 strikeouts (averaging 174 strikeouts per 162 games played) — it looks pretty ugly. But the fact is, Branyan was actually pretty productive last year in Seattle, if you look at the numbers that actually relate to run production. His on-base percentage was .347, good enough for 46th in the American League (one notch ahead of Grady Sizemore), and his slugging average was .520, which was 16th in the AL. And anyone who thinks his batting average and strikeout totals matter more than those numbers doesn't really understand the game.

Branyan hit a career-high 31 home runs last year for the Mariners in 116 games, the most he'd played in the majors in a season since 2002, when he was 26. It's true that he's at an age when most hitters decline, and it's true that he'd never produced in the majors like he did in 2009, suggesting it might be a one-year aberration. But given that our other first-base options were Matt LaPorta and Michael Brantley — two guys who have never produced much at the major-league level — it's worth giving him a shot for a $2 million, one-year contract.