So the Yankees are going to start relying on Eduardo Nunez?

It has been suggested by some baseball pundits that the Yankees believe that Eduardo Nunez will start playing a bigger role in the 2012 season. I have no way of knowing if this is true, so I just want to look at Nunez himself and look at how he might fare in the bigger role. He only sees 3.61 pitches per plate appearance in his major league career, and 3.67 in 2011. The league average is 3.82. He is a contact hitter, putting the ball in play 82% of the time. Contact hitting tends to be overrated, baseball history shows that you can strikeout a lot and still be very productive, and you can make a lot of contact, but still not get on base. His batting average on balls in play was only .286. For comparison, Corey Hart's was .333, and Mike Carp's was .343. He waked in only 6.5% of his plate appearances, well below the league average of 8.3%. His extra-base hits percentage is also below average (his is 6.9, the league average is 7.5), and only homers once every 60 at-bats. He was a big time groundball hitter in 2010, at 1.82 GB/FB ratio, but was down around league average in his 338 2011 plate appearances. His OBP is .314, well below league average, and in the minors, his OBP was never above .365, and that was in A-ball. In AAA, his OBP was just .340. His slugging and OPS are also well below league averages. He never even reached a OPS of .800 in the minors. He only had 38 runs created in 2011, and has a career .85 PPG (which is terrible) and 2.68 PAPP (not too bad, but not good). His stolen base percentage is also below 80%. This all adds up to a .4 Offensive War in 2011. His defense was even worse, at -1.1 D-WAR, adding up to a -.7 WAR. There is really nothing statistically that shows Nunez would have a breakout, or even decent, season if given more playing time. In fact, it looks like Nunez is set up to be a total disaster, both offensively and defensively.