Add new comment

It's a scarcity question.  The hardest positions to fill with plus bats are the glove positions up the middle: C, 2B, SS, CF.  It's hard to be good enough with a glove to stay there AND to be a plus bat.
Any schmoe can stand in LF and try not to fall down catching fly balls.  The pool of talent that can do that is far larger, so it's EASIER to find a plus bat there (in theory - in practice the Ms suck at it).  The job requirements aren't as stiff.  It should give you more options for solutions that give you a plus bat in LF than you would have at 2B.
So what happens when you put a plus bat for a glove position at a corner position?
Well, how have many of us felt about Ichiro in RF?  As a CF he's one of the greatest offensive forces to ever man the position, and even his decline phase as a CF would still have value.  Last year Ichiro was 7th in WAR among right fielders, and 15th in OPS.  That's what SHOULD happen when a guy who can play CF is racing around in RF as a better fielder than his peers, but is not the kind of heavy swinger that most of those guys are.  11 guys who qualified for the batting title had an OPS higher than .800 last year in RF.
If Ichiro had been playing CF? Only 3 guys were over .800.  You put a player at the hardest position he can field so that you can maximize his bat value and not clog up a corner position with non-corner power.  The Ms have been hamstringing themselves for years with needing a Juicing Bret Boone or freakin' A-Rod to compensate for the LF, RF, 1B and DH holes.  If you are gonna have a 100 OPS+ hitter in those positions then you'd better have a 130 at a glove position.
It's not about maximizing Ackley's financial value - in fact, the club money-wise WOULD be better off playing Ackley in LF where his comps are are men 5 inches and 40 pounds bigger who hit 30+ HRs a year, which Ackley will not do. We'd save money in arbitration by having him compared to those guys and their skillsets.
If you move Ackley to LF to "fix that hole" and Seager turns out to be overmatched in the bigs (80 OPS+, let's say) then what do you do?  Move him back to 2B?  Meanwhile the LF you could have added has signed elsewhere and because it's a glove position the only available 2B are no better than Seager.
You put Ackley at 2B to have a constant:  THIS guy will be one of the best-hitting second basemen in the league.  Period.  And then you go get a big side of beef to stand in LF with a glove on his hand and crush homers at the plate.  It's not being unfair to Seager.  Seager is not as good a hitter as Ackley.  Now, the difference between expected performance of a 2B and a 3B is not large, and in my mind BOTH are considered glove positions.
Moving Seager to 3B and having a slightly underperforming third-sacker is more that outweighed by having Ackley at 2B as a plus-plus offensive 2nd-baseman.
But I wouldn't play Seager in LF.  I'd get a better bat for that.  Otherwise you're wasting the whole point of Ackley at 2B in the first place, which is to add to your ability to find crushers at RF/LF/1B/DH and stacking the deck as an offense.
Ackley in LF isn't much better of a hitter than you SHOULD be able to get there.  A third of the teams in baseball had a LF with an OPS over .800 last year, and several more had a combination of players that added up to around that number.  
Number of teams that had a 2B with an OPS over .800? Five, and it's basically only ever between 4 and 6.
If it's twice as hard to get a 2B that hits like that as it is to get a LF, then supply-and-demand would dictate that they're far more prized.
You can get a good-hitting LF in trade, in FA or in the draft.  Much harder at 2B.  Which sucks for Seager, but 3B is a nice consolation prize.  And if we were to trade him, his value as a 2B would be high for just that reason, so that's good for us.
Maybe we could even trade him for a plus LF and then have 2 plus bats for our trouble...but there's no way Seager plays 2B for us unless Ackley absolutely faceplants defensively or our CF situation gets so dire that we have to move him back to the position he was originally supposed to play.
~G