Archive of SportingNews.com's old SOM Baseball forum

OK, I have a 2007 team and in the draft ended up with Ortiz and Braun, in Camden Yards. I tried moving things around but to no avail. So I'm running Ortiz out to 1B each day. In your judgment, how bad is this? In 6 games, 2 errors, 2 hits on 1BX. On the other hand 5 homers and a slew of RBI in the nice park for LH hitters.

Don't do it. :twisted:

You lessen the value of Braun and Ortiz to your team by using him in the field. You basically subtract their defensive hits/errors allowed from their offensive stats to get their overall value. I don't know who you have at DH but I would get rid of that person and move Ortiz there. IF you have lots of LH SP in your division you can keep Braun at 3B due to his insane card vs LHP. However if you will only face about 25% LH SP then I'm not sure he is worth playing in the field.

You don't have to have 1's at 1B & 3B but I think 5's will kill you. You can generally hide 4's there but personally I wouldn't use 5's, especially two of them.

I don't think I've ever used even one 5 in the field let alone two of them. I usually don't worry about having a great fielder at either of these positions but you don't want someone who will kill you either.

Ortiz doesn't kill you because of the 5, he kills you because of the errors. Same w/ Braun. And while Ortiz will cost your team 25 runs defensively, Braun would cost you about 40. Short of playing D'Angelo Jimenez at SS, you can't do much worse than this.

I'm platooning Thome at 1B on one team and have noticed no problems at all. But Thome only has seven errors: a 5e7 is roughly equal to a 3e19 or a 4e11 (at both 1B and 3B). Guys are playing Howard at 1B all the time (4e14).

Even w/ all the errors, Ortiz only costs you eight or nine more runs than Thome or Howard over the course of the season. Does his offense make up for that? The answer is most likely, yes.

The gray area is the overall context of the situation. Is your team already poor defensively? What are the ratings at the other positions? How's the pitching? What do the oppostion ballparks and pitchers look like?

There's been a lot of handwringing about defense over the years, and I'm the first to admit that I always looked for an edge by being better on defense than the opposition. But as the cards continue to be more fairly priced, I think that it's no longer mandatory to be 1s and 2s all around and hiding a couple of 3s in the corners. Like [b:df68ed8d00]LMBombers[/b:df68ed8d00] said, the key is knowing how many runs a guy "gives back" with his glove and knowing whether his bat overcomes that figure.

Youre worrying too much. Ortiz is an absolute offensive monster who clearly is an asset at 1b, defense be damned. Braun is a closer call yet still is a fine play. Against lefties, its nuclear annihilation time where his bat overwhelms all other considerations. You just need an adequate replacement for the late innings of close games and youre fine. And if you can mix in a lefty bat/better defender against righties in pitcher's parks, its takes even more of the sting out. Stand pat.

I played Hafner at 1B a few times in 07 with no ill results that I could tell. His bat more than made up for his D IMO...Ortiz, although not the monster he was last year, is still darn good, and in a pinch would play him at 1B, although it would not be my first choice. Would not play Braun in the field, just too lousy, but would be an excellent DH.... :wink:

In my experience you don't see many championship teams with such bad "D" as you suggest. I am the first to buck a trend or belief, but having two of them is tough. If the rest of your "D" was outstanding, I could see it. With only an average defense at other positions, I would not try it, but what do I know?

Thanks....I have found a way to stick Braun at DH 100% of the time and I'm just going to live with Ortiz at 1B with a late inning replacement who can actually move. The team is pretty strong defensively at the other positions, and if the first few nights are any indication, Ortiz will more than cover any problems he gives me on defense. I do have Hudson on the staff, who looks like he might really suffer from lousy D....