I understand the gentleman's point, but what qualifies as routine in Major League Baseball is quite different from what qualifies as routine in a good softball league. With respect, I think a good softball player would be hopelessly (and obviously) lost in the field in low A ball.

Most plays are routine. MLB players should make 90% of them. Good softball players should make most of them. It’s the consistency that matters, being able to make the 90% of plays often enough to be MLB caliber. Infielders can catch fly balls in the outfield. Outfielders can catch grounders and throw out runners.

I think this is demonstrably false. Just this season, we've seen Eduardo Núñez look even worse in the outfield than he does in the infield (which is saying something) and Aubrey Huff be forced into emergency duty at second base and completely blow a play. And that's just the examples involving NY teams that I'm aware of, I'm sure there are others. Picking defensive players at random would be an abject disaster.

Yeah I imagine it wouldn't be difficult to disprove this by comparing DER for those emergencies where one player was out of position versus all other times.

But the idea is fun - It would be entertaining to watch Juan Pierre play catcher or Jose Molina play centerfield.

The fact that so many guys take a major-league career path of "utility man" proves that TFA has a point. On the other hand, it also proves the point to be a bit over-obvious. It's basically true that unless a RH thrower is too slow to function, he can play anywhere except pitcher or catcher. But it's also basically true that teams get a significant competitive advantage by sorting the positions by difficulty, and specializing the skills of the defenders. The gains may be small, but so are the differences between .250 and .300 hitters, or .500 and .567 ballclubs. They're still real gains.

Think of it this way: if you watch college baseball, or indie or low-minor-league pro ball, you see a lot of inadequate defense. Most Division-I third basemen get eaten up by tough chances that would be good, but unamazing, plays for a major-league 3B. Now, of course, the college 3B can make routine plays (as TFA suggests), and a few of those 3B hit well enough to become major-league first basemen, able to make the more difficult plays there. The fact that they could be capable of standing at 3B and making routine plays is still not evidence for a "names out of a hat" theory.

Andruw Jones used to take infield at SS with the Braves, and he wasn't terrible. It's the Byron Buxton striking-out-18 in his state championship game phenomena. Some guys are just built to play baseball, and the difference between them at the ML level is not massive. The big gap in talent is between the guys who can play anywhere at ML levels, and those who can't. And contrary to the article, there's an even bigger gap between those AAA/AAAA players - we can call them "Pastornickys" if you want to - and even traveling league softball players. There aren't many guys in the best softball leagues who could cut it defensively at AA.

I think the biggest obstacles in pushing guys up the defensive chain are mental ones. Players don't want to be crappy defensively if they can avoid it. Mostly, though, if you tried to inject below-average fielders everywhere your pitchers would eventually respond by throwing batting practice to the opposition.

I think the biggest obstacles in pushing guys up the defensive chain are mental ones. Players don't want to be crappy defensively if they can avoid it. Mostly, though, if you tried to inject below-average fielders everywhere your pitchers would eventually respond by throwing batting practice to the opposition.

I would think it would be the opposite - the pitchers would be afraid to throw strikes and start walking everyone since they'd hate anyone making solid contact.

Mostly, though, if you tried to inject below-average fielders everywhere

The Brewers did this last year, except for center field.

Taking the non-recognizable players from my fantasy team, I'd love to see the following lineup:

C - Angel Pagan
1B - Torii Hunter
2B - Lucas Duda
3B - Freddie Freeeman
SS - Kurt Suzuki
LF - Chris Iannetta
CF - Ike Davis
RF - Neil Walker

There aren't many guys in the best softball leagues who could cut it defensively at AA

Of course, if by "good softball players should make most of them" TFA means that good softball players would have AA fielding percentages of .600, the contention might be true. Baseball is interesting in that there are lots of easy fielding chances: I am a 53-year-old non-athlete who never even played Little League, and there's a fair chance that I could catch some popups, or throw out Bengie Molina on a soft ground ball.

But the fielding percentage of major-league players as a whole is around .980. With small variations depending on position, as Sam indicates, if you can't field close enough to .980 you can't play in the majors. That's a sky-high level of "ordinary" play.

(Or take whatever other metric you want, obviously: I chose fielding percentage because it's dead simple.)

I am a 53-year-old non-athlete who never even played Little League, and there's a fair chance that I could catch some popups, or throw out Bengie Molina on a soft ground ball.

Pop flys are more difficult than you'd think, if you've never seen one come off the bat before. "Can of corns" are actually difficult for a beginner. I play on the infield more often than not, only switching to the OF when a given game's roster requires it. I'm not bad out there, but the first fly to my zone is always an adventure internally. And I always play the Chipper Jones OF alignment. Back to the wall and come in on everything. Going back on a ball is friggin' *hard.*

You're right about popups, Sam. One memory from my own softball days is that the easiest ball to catch was a soft looping line drive straight at you, the trajectory being not unlike someone deliberately tossing you a ball. I freely admit I would drop damn near everything :)

Pop flys are more difficult than you'd think

I think almost every play is actually much, much harder than it looks.
You play other positions so you think 1b is easy, try it sometime.
Or catcher. Especially catcher.

I think 1B gets the "easy position" reputation because no one ever sees what the defender has to do on plays that aren't balls hit to him. A play to any other infielder the ball (or the fan's eye generally) will follow the ball, then the throw, and there's the first baseman just standing there and catching the ball. Easy! Get out there in the field, have to make the sprint to the bag, find the bag, get your body into proper "receiving" position and find the ball in the air, all while the other guy is fielding and easy two hopper. Not as easy as it looks at all.

Meh, pop-ups are easy. Sun and wind are hard. :-) (Actually I suppose one nice thing about rec league stuff is not having to deal with cross-winds in stadiums.) As they always say, I only ever had real trouble with the ones hit right at me in the OF.

But I agree with everything written here. This is as silly as the BABIP strawman that any AAA pitcher could come up and have a league-average BABIP. By the time you reach the majors, you've been selected as a non-embarrassing fielder (or one hell of a bat). You don't see the ones who can't do it well enough unless you watch the minors and lower -- and you see lots of "bad" fielding down there. But as BDC notes, what does the guy really mean about "most".

And how are we defining chances? I might believe that Prince Fielder would make the play on 90% of the balls he got to at SS or even 99% of the ones he got to in CF but that's not exactly the point.

Anyway, yes, I think that with a reasonably small amount of practice, almost any ballplayer can become that level of capabile OF -- i.e. make the plays they get to. I am willing to grant that Todd Hundley may have been the rare human that couldn't do that although I'm not sure how much practice he really had.* But I think if you take any competent ML infielder and you can pretty easily turn them into a competent ML outfielder. Brian Downing had a career 995 FP as an OF. Stargell was 961. Sheffield, the worst OF ever by Rfield, was 977 and Luzinski, the worst OF ever by Primer anecdote, was 972. And even Todd Hundley made it to 898. So, yeah, I think you can put just about any ML player in the OF and they'll make 90% of the routine plays (and/or 90% of the plays they can get to, not including throwing errors at least).

P-I doesn't allow searches by FP (near as I can tell) and we never have discussions of worst IF around here so I used Rfield. By Rfield, the worst-ever semi-regular ML IF appears to be Pat Rockett who in just over 1000 innings at SS racked up -38 runs. He had a FP of 95%. His RF though was more than .5 plays per 9 below the league average. Lyle Luttrell (50s Sens) gives Rockett a run for his money with -17 in 429 innings at SS (936 FP). Trevor Plouffe is the active leader with -20 in 465 innings at SS (944 FP) and another -5 in 255 innings at 2B/3B (990 and 940 FPs). Obviously the Twins play him for his bat. :-)

So the absolute worst "true SS" appear to be around a 940 FP and/or -40 to -50 runs in a full season. Presumably Prince Fielder emergency SS would be worse than that but a 900 FP doesn't seem ridiculously high and 850 would seem about the worst you could expect.

Anyway, I'm not sure what the point of the article is. In the end, is it pointing out anything other than that good fielding isn't so much about FP as it is about range?** Is it a reaction to an "X makes all the routine plays" type of praise?

* C is the one truly different position I think. They get some pop-up plays but those really are a different beast of pop-up (those do look ridiculously hard and I exempt them from my popups are easy statement) but they never really have to deal with a ground ball. And while they need to get a good jump now and then, it's an entirely different type of jump than an OF or IF. It makes some sense that their skills translate better to the reaction positions (1B and 3B) than elsewhere ... yet there have been lots of reasonably successful C to OF conversions.

** and the weird little things like how to turn a DP, where to go on cutoff, covering the bag on a steal, etc. (thinking of the Huff play here).

they never really have to deal with a ground ball.

Not directly, but they do have to take a throw and tag an oncoming runner who may or may not be aiming for the plate.
Hell, they have to hang on to foul tips, if they can. That's hard enough, right there.

In saying Cs never have to deal with a ground ball, I didn't mean to suggest that made the position easier -- I meant it as a reason why converting them to IF would be difficult. Piazza may not have fielded a ground ball for 20 years before they asked him to move to 1B, it wasn't a surprise that it didn't come "naturally" to him. As to foul tips, that's why I said it makes sense to convert them to the "reaction" positions.

In saying Cs never have to deal with a ground ball, I didn't mean to suggest that made the position easier -- I meant it as a reason why converting them to IF would be difficult.

I think they're all kind of "reaction" positions.
I don't think any of them are easy, but catcher would move to all of the other positions, better than any of the other positions would move to catcher.

I think they're all kind of "reaction" positions.

Eh, not really. SS has to cover a lot of ground while the 3B has to get from here to 6 feet from here in half-a-second. SS have to do that from time to time but it's not the main skill set. And, in the OF, lots of guys outrun bad jumps or bad reads.

And, again, are we talking about "fielding" or "range"? C, 3B and 1B (probably in that order) are where you need a super-quick glove. It's nice to have that in your SS too but you're willing to sacrifice that for a guy with good range. In the OF, you don't need a quick glove at all and, as the Luzinski to Downing examples show, almost every OF makes the play on balls they get to. You need range and, obviously, "jump" helps with range but that's a different type of reaction than snaring the vicious one-hopper hit 5 feet to your right ... and you're much more likely to get away with a poor jump on any given play in the OF than you are with having slow reflexes at 3B.

And, again, are we talking about "fielding" or "range"? C, 3B and 1B (probably in that order) are where you need a super-quick glove.

I would pick the nit and say, speaking strictly of bat-hits-ball-at-the-the-defender scenarios, the order should be C > P >> 3B >>> 1B >>> SS > 2B >>>>>>>>>>>>> OF*

*unless Gary Sheffield is hitting