Fine. It remains to be seen if the godawful range will continue or he will lose weight again or do whatever he needs to become an adequate 3B. But as he ages it becomes more unreasonable to expect that and in the meantime he's having a terrible season defensively that counts and impacts the team.Snodgrass'Muff said:
It does not remain to be seen. The sample is not predictive. End of sentence. If it turns out that he continues to have a UZR similar to that over a proper sample, the sample that exists now does not retroactively become predictive.
As for the eye test, our eyes are only so trustworthy and our biases have a heavy impact on how we interpret what we are seeing. He hasn't been good defensively, but there are a number of possible reasons for that, and it's not unreasonable to be optimistic that he's going to settle in and be an average to somewhat above average defender again in the future.
His DRS by year at third: -11, 1, 15, -5, -5, 4, -11. -12 for his career in 7 years and not a good trend
UZR (rounding to whole runs): -4, -1, 13, 1, -5, 4, -13. -4 in 7 years.
And the very good year is now 5 years ago. Why is it reasonable to expect him to settle in? Maybe we throw out both positive and negative outliers? Then he's -16 in DRS and -4 in UZR.