That's nice. I'm a forward-thinker. "That's nice", now foward-think this. In Lopez's 7 season, he has posted an OPS above .750 once. That's nice. He wasn't a full-time starter until he was 25 and got a lot of on the job training as a young player. Since then he's been pretty good with most of his OPS being OBP-driven (which means OPS underrates him). That's nice. Remove 2005 and his .258/.321/.399 line ges even uglier. His .294 OBP in 377 ABs this year screams "pretty good job" to me. Did I mention he is an awful defensive SS? That's nice but he's been good two of three years as a starter, which is more than Cedeno will probably say. He's not good defensively, but not anemic. He'll get the job done. He's not any worse than Theriot. No, he's pretty awful defensively. He doesn't have good range, and makes alot of errors. You can remove all of his career stats you want and focus on his two good years (although last year wasn't even good), but that doesn't change the fact for the majority of his career, including this year, he has been bad. His bad defensively, and his offense doesn't do anything to make up for it. This year, his offensive troubles have added to is defensive troubles. There's no reason to go out and give up something for a guy like that. He is at best on par with Theriot.