Heh, let me start by saying, good luck trying to hurt my feelings on this.  Marte already has greatly underperformed not just my hopes but my expectations as well; that crow has been digesting for most of a year already.  All I've got left is the fact that he hasn't gotten a meaningful opportunity in the majors, but at least I can say that that is not a matter of opinion -- it is cold, hard fact.

Do the offensive struggles correlate with defensive struggles?  Yeah, I would assume that they often would.  If "settling in" really is the issue -- and I'm not saying it is, I'm just saying it could be -- it would make sense for him to show it on defense, and clearly he has.  How else to account for his five years of sterling defensive reviews in the minors, when every time we (briefly) get to watch him, he looks terrible?

I think the Marte haters have lost sight not only of just how little opportunity he's been given, but also just how much we have to gain by making a real ballplayer out of him.  He must be considered a bit of a longshot to stick as a regular at this point, but as I wrote recently of Matt Whitney, at least he's a longshot with huge upside.  And by "huge upside," I don't mean the traditional meaning of a high ceiling for the player's skills, I mean the team's ROI upside.  Having a solid player fill a key position for 5-6 years -- and cheap -- is worth tens of millions to the club, which translates to a dozen or more marginal wins.

You call a guy up six times over two years, give him 10 to 40 PA each time, and what have you got?  Nothing.  A whole bunch of pitifully small samples that don't tell you a damned thing.  Obviously.

As further evidence of how thoughtless your comment is, Cabrera is an argument for my side of the argument, not yours.  He struggled after the WBC but still got into 75 more games before being released.  That's five more games than Marte has gotten into, despite the fact that Cabrera is a reliever rather than an everyday player.