Should Mat Gamel stay in the majors?

A pretty good post from Adam McCalvy last night regarding the recent pine-ride for hot prospect Mat Gamel and whether or hot he’ll get sent back down to the minor leagues after this upcoming series. In case you didn’t read the article:

Casey McGehee has forced himself into the Brewers’ everyday lineup, in turn forcing club officials to reconsider whether third-base prospect Mat Gamel might be better served by a return to Triple-A Nashville.

“We’ll talk about that internally,” Brewers general manager Doug Melvin said. “That’s not something we would discuss publicly, but you’re always having discussions. It’s probably something you look at from a series-by-series standpoint.”

Gamel, promoted from Nashville on May 14 ahead of Interleague Play, was on the bench for the fifth time in six games on Tuesday, mostly because the Brewers were facing left-handed Mets ace Johan Santana in the second of a three-game series. But Gamel, who bats left-handed, has seen his playing time decrease of late against righties because of the emergence of McGehee, who entered play Tuesday with a .370 average, five home runs and 20 RBIs over his past 20 games.

McGehee, not Gamel, started at third base on Monday against Mets right-hander Fernando Nieve.

To me Gamel has largely disappointed at the plate so far, hitting .236/.340/.382 in slightly over 100 plate appearances with poor defense, making him barely above replacement-level in such a small sample size. It makes sense to see Gamel struggling after being so hot in AAA before he came up, and 100 PAs is a small sample size anyway, so it’s not a big deal that Gamel hasn’t produced to what I expected him to. A trip to AAA for a little while longer would be a good way to get Gamel consistent at-bats and coaching from defensive stud Don Money.

That doesn’t mean that a) he won’t turn it around yet this year and b) the Brewers have a better option at third right now. The way the lineup would be slated if the Brewers sent Gamel back down would put Casey McGehee at 2nd and Craig Counsell at third. The offensive dropoff at third would be tremendous, and I’m not so sure I would trust those two as starters right now considering how much has been made of Casey’s knee and how fragile Counsell’s legs are.

Not to mention that McGehee is riding an ultra-hot streak to the tune of a .950 OPS right now and once he starts cooling off Gamel should grab the extra time (and maybe get hot again) while McGehee takes on the backup role. I’m surprised in itself that Casey’s hit so well for so long, but there’s something about a .325/.388/.544 line that doesn’t match up with his career .283/.340/.417 line in the minor leagues.

So when Casey cools off and Gamel’s down in the minors, do we really want up to three black holes in the lineup (McGehee, Jason Kendall and Bill Hall)? I guess what I’m saying here is that I’m assuming a .200 point OPS increase from the minors to the majors is more than likely going to merit a crash back down to earth.

In order to avoid that and putting Hall in the lineup anywhere at all I’d highly recomment keeping Mat Gamel up in the majors. We’ll see if that actually happens though — it sounded like McCalvy in his story tried to create a story out of thin air here.