plus runners wont be able to go 1st to 3rd as often on a groundball to RF as a normal RF wouldnt have to play so deep.

Duda was damn near the warning track against Reyes ( to prevent a triple )

Reyes hits a single and a runner basically moonwalked from 1B to 3B as BigFoot took too long to get to it

these are the little things the sabermetric wizard doesnt consider…

this is why i was shocked Bay wasnt in RF as he has decent range and speed…which means he is 10x faster than Duda

You put your best ARM in RF not LF and if you have a power guy who is slow footed it is MUCH better to put him in LF where getting to the ball late doesn’t give up the extra base due to the much shorter throw involved.

The issue with Duda is anything down the line, He catches just fine when he gets to it and his arm is ok nothing to write home about.

By putting him in LF on hits down the line they will stay doubles instead of the triples they become when he is there in RF.

All because the 3rd base coach is going to hold up the runner at 2nd on a hit to LF where he will wave the runner over on a similar hit to right.

So LF is actuallly the best place for Duda right now.

If you figure Duda, Kirk, Hairston are the “starters, with Cowgill and Baxter as bench guys. You then have Recker as the C, Turner as the 2B/3B guy and then you have either Cedeno if re-signed, Bixler, Q, or (shudders) Valdy as SS/2B backups.

Honestly, unless Valdy claims an everyday OF spot or proves to be better than Baxter, I’m not sure he makes the big club.

does not really matter where the big bats were playing, just how many they had!

My opinion is that if you don’t have a “real” everyday player (or a prospect with major upside), then hell yeah platoon. Best way to hide flaws and maximize output.

now, like Tex said above, you have 6 guys. I don’t think there will be 3 full platoons, more like a 5 man rotation, so 1 of the lefties (most likely Duda) will be in all the time.

so take out one of the RH batters (brown or Hairston, being considered for the same job) and the winner + cowgirl will be starting somewhere vs. LHP.

in any case, the bench is going to get a lot of ABs this year, with pretty much everyone except the MI BU being a semi-regular instead.

Only way this works is if one of these guys is also a legit 3B/1B back up. 3B being less of an issue most likely.

so playing along, Duda plays 1B. Hairston, he probably could in a pinch.

3B would have to be Murphy, or whoever was the MI BU guy (and at this point, I am totally befuddled as to who that is)

the scary idea is they seem to think Turner could play OF too, meaning he could be part of this rotation.

At least there’s a chance that Kirk Nieuewenhuis, Lucas Duda, Collin Cowgill, Mike Baxter and Andrew Brown improve a bit considering their medium age in the mid 20s and lack of MLB track record. Is it likely ? No, at least not for the majority of them. Still, weirder things have happened. All have in common that they have nothing left to prove at AAA, a level they have mostly dominated in recent years. So might as well find out for good whether they are Quad A players or something better in 2013.

Nobody thought players such as Jon Jay, Allen Craig, David Freese, Skip Shoemaker, Danny Descalso would lead the St.Louis Cardinals to the playoffs multiple times. None of them ever was a highly touted, top 100 in Baseball caliber prospect and most of them were 26 or 27 when they became fulltime major leaguers.

Considering that 2013 will be a building year anyway, might as well try to find out what you can squeeze out of a group like that.