Would you rather play Omar Vizquel or Albert Pujols at shortstop?

[pokah5]

Vizquel, the thought of having to put Pujols at SS scares me.

[metsandfinsfan]

depends on your team. do you have ground ball pitchers? how is the rest of your defense?

tough to answer

i used to be happy when the mets would play hojo at shortstop even though he sucked there, but he could do 30/30.

[Assani Fisher]

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If you take Mo Vaughn and give him Pujols/Arod hitting skills this would be a much more interesting question.

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Yes, this was more or less my intention. I have apparently underrated Pujols's fielding quite a bit.

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I could be wrong, but I think what you're trying to get at is....

Everyone picks Pujols. This then shows that players who become superstars just because they're good "for their position" are overvalued. Examples of these types of players would be Cal Ripken, Craig Biggio, Mike Piazza, etc.

[NT!]

i would take pujols because it would be funny to make him play SS

[NickMPK]

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If you take Mo Vaughn and give him Pujols/Arod hitting skills this would be a much more interesting question.

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Yes, this was more or less my intention. I have apparently underrated Pujols's fielding quite a bit.

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I could be wrong, but I think what you're trying to get at is....

Everyone picks Pujols. This then shows that players who become superstars just because they're good "for their position" are overvalued. Examples of these types of players would be Cal Ripken, Craig Biggio, Mike Piazza, etc.

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Well, I asked because the answer is not obvious to me. But if the answer is obviously Pujols to everyone else, it does seem to indicate that teams might overvalue fielding when building their line-up (perhaps because watching Pujols field at SS "looks stupider" than having watching a mediocre hitter at bat).

I'm an Oriole fan, so I'm obviously not going to say Ripken is overrated...I think he has HOF numbers regardless of position. As for Piazza, I think it's a little different for catchers, because most of them would probably have better offensive numbers if they didn't play catcher. I'd bet Piazza would be well over 500 HRs if he played his entire career at 1B.

[kyleb]

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Everyone picks Pujols. This then shows that players who become superstars just because they're good "for their position" are overvalued. Examples of these types of players would be Cal Ripken, Craig Biggio, Mike Piazza, etc.

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If this was your point, you picked three really bad ones to prove it.

[Assani Fisher]

I don't know baseball well and I've admitted it before. But I am pretty certain that those 3 players have good offensive numbers for their positions, but if you pretended that they were first basemen or other more offensive minded positions their numbers would no longer look that great. Assuming thats true, then I picked 3 players that perfectly described what I was talking about. Perhaps you can explain to me exactly why you feel they are bad examples.

[SuperUberBob]

Vizquel is over 40 years old. No thanks.

Pujols would likely make up for the runs allowed by his defensive play through offensive output.

[Thremp]

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why are we considering this. derek jeter already plays shortstop and is better than omar vizquel and probably isn't appreciably worse than pujols.

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Heh. Pujols would be a monster jopke. I'd be stunned to see just how bad his defense would be.

My rough guess is he'd be 10-20 runs below replacement level. Which makes him pretty effing terrible. He'd still probably be around league average due to his stick though.

[kyleb]

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I don't know baseball well and I've admitted it before. But I am pretty certain that those 3 players have good offensive numbers for their positions, but if you pretended that they were first basemen or other more offensive minded positions their numbers would no longer look that great. Assuming thats true, then I picked 3 players that perfectly described what I was talking about. Perhaps you can explain to me exactly why you feel they are bad examples.

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The only borderline guy you picked was Biggio.

Piazza: .308/.377/.546

I mean, lol @ those stats from any position, really.

Ripken: .276/.340/.447

Twenty years of this with ++++++++ defense at SS makes him easily one of the best players, plus all that durability stuff that we love to talk about here. Now that's not a great bat at first base, but even if you under-adjust for positional scarcity, those are very, very nice numbers, especially considering he played a ton of years while being legitimately not good.