Anyone use Piazza?

[durantjerry]

Seems like a decent fit for my team in MM with a couple of lefty parks and hitting parks in my division. Other divisions favor RH. He has the slugging vs RHP's and more average without losing much #HR facing the lefties in the LH parks.

[STEPHENDESMOND]

Yep, won a title with him, Greene and Chavez. Piazza hit 27 HRS (only one vs lefty pitching) with 57 RBI. Greene added 14 & 40. Chavez came in for late-inning base stealing defense.

Initially, Greene only played when Piazza went down, but he showed much more pop vs leftys, so it became a platoon. I used Piazza vs lefties only in pitcher's parks.

[ArtemusRex]

With the C position in 2006 being a Injury-2 or better my approach is for a R-L platoon from the start. In that, Piazza might be a bit much but I also wouldnt use him as a fulltimer. Starting Monday will be my first time using him (@ US Cellular no less) and the tale above gives me some hope. Really though, he should do well. And to add defense into to discussion, his range and throwing arm may be lacking but his T and PB rating makes up for it.

[TomSiebert]

Anybody actually use him at Catcher? Or only DH?

tws

[Mean Dean]

I haven't used Piazza this year, but I did win a 24-team e-mail league with him as my regular catcher last year! I also won 90 here with him catching two years ago, and all the way back in '01, I won 107 here with Robert Fick [5(+2)e7] catching.

You can definitely win with a poor arm at catcher; it's just not a big deal. Just like you're not going to score a lot of runs solely because you steal bases, you're not going to give up a lot of runs solely because you give up steals. I don't think you could win with a catcher who is completely defensively inadequate in all areas a la Matt LeCroy (hell, I even had major problems with Kelly Stinnett this year), but as [b:ecec74db51]ArtemusRex[/b:ecec74db51] points out, Piazza is fine on T and PB, so it really shouldn't be a problem.

[cummings2]

Well, these numbers are from one of those Hitter cazy leagues so the numbers are very skewed:

Piazza
ABs: 255
2B: 16
HR: 20
BB: 21
SO: 28
AVG: .302
SLG: .640
OBP: .360

E: 0
PB: 3
34 Opp. SBs
10 CS