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Grizz was recently talking about the old evaluations that G-money and I did on Wlad where it was observed that Wlad was taking some time to adjust at certain levels and got better as time went on.  We saw that in his first year in Tacoma relative to his second year, natch, but I think we're also encountering that right now in Seattle.  It's amazing to me how far his strikeout rate has plummeted, but I'm also starting to think of what we should be doing with him for next year.  Given that we're going to have Saunders and probably Ackley, Halman as a more distant possibility, up in the next year or two, I'm wondering if our man Wlad isn't the answer to our DH woes.  I haven't generally heard him lauded for his work ethic before, I had always operated under the assumption that lack of PT would be catastrophic for him, but he's been showing us lately that he can come in prepared, regardless of whether or not he's been playing recently.
 
As to Lopez at third, yeah, he played there a bit his last few seasons in the minors and it was Churchill's prefered position for him for some time.  I think that he'd be able to do well there, not so sure about the hitting as he seems to go back and forth on that, but there are worse placeholders until one of Tui/Martinez/de Jesus, maybe even Liddi is available to do it more regularly.  The only issue I'd have with that is that would leave us with Yuni and Cedeno on the IF, and I'm just not sure if that's ideal.  There's certainly not much coming up the pipeline soon.  Although I'll argue in favor of Juan Diaz whenever the opportunity arises, I would like it if the M's we able to pick up a top middle infielder in either the draft or the international signing period.  I think we have enough outfielders to go around for now.