Bleacher Bums Forum

First off, tico is clearly a scumbag and the spawn of all evil for his obvious hatred of Darwin Barney.

Seriously, not to deify Barney, but I think he deserves all the credit he's been getting as the best defensive 2B in baseball right now.  First, Barney did tie a major league record for most consecutive errorless games . . . and he did that while fielding more plays per 9 innings than anybody in the league.  That's excellent defense, regardless of how much Sveum's positioning has to do with it.   You're not just going to find someone who can just do that and field all of those plays cleanly, just because we play some aggressive shifts in the field.

Also, I don't think positioning is all on a coaching staff, either.  Good defensive players have a good feel for where they should position themselves on the field.  I'm sure Sveum's aggressive shifting helps play a role in that, but I think if you ask any top fielding player (guys like Ripken or Sandberg or Ozzie talk about this a lot), they all say they have good instincts for where they should position themselves on the field. Ripken and Sandberg would say that's one of the reasons why you didn't have to see them diving for balls so much because they already knew where they should be positioned on the field for a play.  I wouldn't attribute all of his good positioning on Sveum.