from Amazon
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Do the best players in baseball tend to play “up the middle?”
Rob Neyer says yes. He also says that it is beneficial to a team for their best player to be “up the middle.” The first part may be true, but I can’t think of any compelling reason off the top of my head why the second one would be true.
On (or is it “in”?) his blog, Rob says this:
Still—and I know this is a stretch, but please bear with me—if you’re looking for a small chink in the Yankee armor in the coming decade, it’s that Mark Teixeira might be their best player. He’ll be in his 30s, and he’ll be playing first base. Ideally, your best player is a bit younger, and playing in the middle of the field.
Now, by definition, the average player at all positions is more or less exactly equal in overall talent (can you say “more or less” or “almost” and “exactly” in the same sentence when referring to the same thing?). The only way it would be true for the most highly talented ones overall to be piled up at one or a few positions is for the distributions around the average player to not be the same at each position - either more or less spread out or not symmetrical at some or all positions. I don’t if that is true or not.
It is possible that you just can’t hit well enough as a 1B, DH, or corner OF in order to be one of best players of all time, but that occasionally you get a player who is an elite hitter AND can play a middle position.
As for the second part of Rob’s comment, that “ideally” the Yankees best position player should play in the middle of the diamond, as I said, I just don’t see why that would be true to any extent other than something de minimus (we can almost always some up with a tiny reason for something to be true - however when we make a comment like that, we usually mean that there is a reasonably significant reason for it to be true).