What will happen to George Brett's B/A+ rating at 3b/1b if he moves to 2b? Will it be worse than And which way is that - a move "up" or "down" the chart I have seen in the forum? As soon as I learn that I wont have to pose this question again. Thanks for your patience.

JohnGPF's thread on out of position penalties...

http://whatifsports.com/forums/Posts.aspx?topicID=376099&page=1

Thank you Kz. I did search for the thread using "out of position" as a search term but came up empty.

I went to John's link but still I do not quite get it. It is funny how elusive this has been for me. Look at John's wording. One important word is missing:

"From there, he is penalized for each spot he moves to the [    ] on the Bill James' Defensive Spectrum."

Is that word "left" or "right" or something else?

OK . . . I just Googled "defensive spectrum" and came up with a clear wikipedia hit. Going from 3b to 2b is two spots more difficult. In the heirarchy of difficulty it goes from 3b - to CF - to 2b. So Brett will take two hits in that move. On a recently completed team I played him at SS which is one more spot harder - 3 hits. He made 26 errors in 33 games. I could estimate a bout 33% fewer errors at 2b than SS. If his bat is really good I can live with that.

The word should be "left."  I commented on this before, but something very odd happened when WIS launched the new forums.  The word "left" - or any string of letters "l-e-f-t" was deleted from every thread.  Seriously.

I have lots of detailed threads covering my progressive teams and where I used to have words like lefty, lefthander, etc I now have "y", "hander" etc. 

That's spooky, Contrarian. Could it be a political statement?

For the missing word to be "left" the vertical spectrum below needs to be tipped on its side, to the right, and made horizontal. That way the penalizing moves that normally go down will be moving to the left.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_spectrum

History

Like many original sabermetric concepts, the idea of a defensive spectrum was first introduced by Bill James in his Baseball Abstract series of books during the 1980s. The basic premise of the spectrum is that positions at the bottom end are more difficult than the positions at the top end of the spectrum. Therefore, the positions at the top are easier to fill, since the physical demands are less as you move left along the spectrum. A corollary to this is the fact that, since defensive skill is at less of a premium at the top end, players at those positions must provide more offense than those at the bottom end. Another corollary is that players can generally move from bottom to top along the spectrum successfully during their careers.

 

The defensive spectrum looks like this:

1. Designated hitter
2. First baseman
3. Left fielder
4. Right fielder
5. Third baseman
6. Center fielder
7. Second baseman
8. Shortstop
9. Catcher
10. Pitcher