"His batting numbers would look a heck of a lot better at second base." It feels like this article is from 2012–the third base position has changed around the league, there arent as many big bulky guys raking homers while fielding the hot corner. In the statcast era teams have looked for rangier defenders at third. Second base and third base actually nearly had the same average OPS across the league last year (2B was .712 and 3B .711) Garcia's a next gen third baseman, and the infield is the least of our problems.
Just seems like an odd thing to focus in on with an OF hitting this poorly.
4 comments
I think the premise he’s working with is that the Royals need two things: 1) someone at 2nd to replace Massey 2) more power in the lineup. The problem is that it’s difficult to find power at 2nd base, so their solution is to move Garcia to 2nd and add power at 3rd base.
The whole article reads like a condemnation of Garcia, which stems mostly from poor writing, but the argument that Garcia could move to 2nd and we could sign a slugger at 3rd is a valid one.
I’d be fine moving him to second
First of all, you can completely ignore any opinion from Royals review. Royals review actively hates being fans of the Royals. They are like if you took Twitter and the doomers from Royals loss game day threads and made them reproduce to create the whiniest little bitches of all time.
Now that that is out of the way. The position the player produces at does not matter. It does not matter. It doesn’t. All that matters is what they produce.
To solve this “issue”, you just do a simple mental exercise. What if Maikel played SS and Bobby played 3B? They’d both be producing as you’d expect right? K. Cool. So the left side of the infield is good to go.
Moving maikel to 2B and listing a 4 next to his name in the lineup instead of a 5 doesn’t suddenly produce more runs for the team.
This is a silly elementary take.
RR commenters are a bunch of fucking olds with olds takes. The writers over there are kind of obsessed with Garcia’s numbers as a 3B even though 3B isn’t that good of an offensive position across the league these days (I don’t think RR has caught on to this) and the Royals have Witt at SS and Garcia’s defense more than makes up for his offense (why are we even talking about Garcia’s offense when he’s been their best hitter?).