Posted by trobone on 5/9/2011 5:30:00 AM (view original):
depends on the rest of your team, can the offensive catcher play 1b? what about DH?
I would never play a catcher at 1B.
I just took a look in one of my worlds, where the world front page listed the leaders in poor plays at first base. The leaders in each league, by a far margin, were both converted catchers. One had 20 poor plays, the other had 17.
I took at look at each guy and looked at each of the minus plays that he made. In all cases, it was on a base hit. I'm assuming it was very poor range (4 for one, 8 for the other) that was turning potential outs into hits. So for the sake of argument, I assumed that each of these minus plays should have been an out at first, with any runners already on base advancing one base. Here's what I found.
For player A, who had 20 minus plays, the 20 minus plays turned into 18 singles and 2 doubles over 825 IP at first base. But even more alarming was that when I reconstructed the innings by turning the minus plays into outs (with runners advancing a base), the minus plays led to 23 runs that otherwise would not have scored. Granted, his team was an abyssmally bad defensive team beyond this guy, but 23 runs in 95 games is almost .25 runs a game. That should open some eyes.
Player B had 17 minus plays, but I somehow lost track of one when going through the boxscores. Of the 16 that I did track, they turned into 12 singles and four doubles over 734 IP at first bas. When reconstructing the innings where the minus plays happened, they led to 9 additional runs. So around .1 runs per game. But he played on a team with much better pitching and overall defense beyond this guy, so that probably helped mitigate the damage.
Bottom line: playing catchers at first base = bad idea, Unless you're getting substantially more offense out of him that you would for a "true" first-baseman type, I'd stay away from it.
10/21/2011 3:52 PM (edited)