RealGM

It's just a question. Would Encarnacion be more of a successful player defensively if he played 1B? Some baseball players that are liabilities playing infied positions and outfield positions are moved to 1B during some time in their careers. A few that pop to mind are guys like Adam Dunn and Albert Pujols.

You are asking is his defense would be better at first? More than likely. He is the wrong handed for it ideally, but at least last year his problem tended to be throwing errors more than range.

That being said, it makes no sense to move him there now. People rag on Lyle as a poor offensive 1b, for good reasons, but Edwin is a worse offensive player over his career. And Lyle is a good defensive 1b, while Edwin would probably be at best a passable one.

If you were going to do this, it would have been platooning him with Lyle; he is far from a full time solution.

Yikes. I hope he doesn't goto first. He isn't fleet of foot. No way he plays first. Not in my lifetime nor his nor Bluejays,

1B is arguably the easiest infield position to play (or at the very least, the easiest position to not screw up in), so defensively I would say almost any poor defender would look better at 1B. However, since the position is so loaded with offensively productively players, if you use Encarnacion as a regular first basement he instantly becomes one of the worst first basemen in baseball in both offensive and defensive production unless not playing 3rd somehow happens to spike up his offensive number is a Jose Bautista-like way.

I think it's a decent idea, and put Bautista at 3rd. This opens up an outfield position for perhaps Thames or someone else via trade. Don't know why some are dumping on his defence. It's ok at 3rd which means it will be just fine at 1st. If you can play 3rd you can sure as hell play 1st!! The throwing was Enc's greatest problem and you eliminate most of that at 1st. I think his numbers could be better as well. I'd like to see him healthy all year. He should be a 30/90 guy if he plays consistently.

I would be ok bringing back EE. He's under control for 2 or 3 more years and he's not a complete write off with his huge power. It's hard to walk away from a guy who could put up .250/.330/.460 with 30+ HR's if given the time.

I think he could be good defensively at 1B as his problems have never been range- always throwing.

baulderdash77 wrote:I would be ok bringing back EE. He's under control for 2 or 3 more years and he's not a complete write off with his huge power. It's hard to walk away from a guy who could put up .250/.330/.460 with 30+ HR's if given the time.

I think he could be good defensively at 1B as his problems have never been range- always throwing.

That is a 790 OPS. It may be hard to walk away from a 3B who can do that, but it's pretty easy to walk away from a 1B.