Corner OF, especially, is one of the most physically taxing positions on the diamond.

CF is actually fairly easy because you can glide in/out of your stops. There's a little more running but a lot of it is at cruising speed and pretty easy. There are very few times you need to really bleed speed like when you're going at a wall. And as the CF, you have defensive priority so if you make a call it's the corners that have to peel off or break down. They're the guys that defer and have to come to those hard stops.

If you play the corners with the same effort you play anywhere else, there's a strong argument that they're the hardest spots to play.

1b is also a lot more taxing on a lower half than people realize. If you play the position correctly, you go up and down with your legs/knees and your back is constantly working to adjust to throws. A bad defensive 1b will lean over a lot but a good one uses his whole body to move with a throw across.

Less athletic people can play the corners and 1b for obvious reasons, but I don't think most people give enough credit to have physically taxing those spots can be.
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Nevermind me...I played center in high school and yea...guess that's why I feel that way.
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!@#$ing glory boy CFers...

Y'all always needed to take those extra 12 steps after you caught the ball, didntchya? Don't act like we didn't see you take those three stutter steps so you could dive for a ball you should've caught at your waist...
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:-)

Well......I played in a corner once and I hated every second of it, the hook and slice is so much more severe out there than in center.
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The other part of that is the K has the biggest outfield in the league that isn't Colorado. Lot of ground to cover.
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Ain't no shit there.

And right about the time you're playing LF and play like you're expecting that tail from a LH batter, it'll be a knuckler that makes you look like a dick.

The corners are a lot like 2b in that the athleticism required is less than CF (as 2b is to SS) but everything about those positions from a purely technical standpoint is more difficult. I was in the unfortunate position of being just athletic/good enough to play SS and CF on bad teams but anytime I had a genuinely good team, there was always someone just good enough to bounce my ass into 2b and LF. Hated both those spots (and eventually pitchers threw stuff that moved, I couldn't hit my weight and that was that).

If you have the athleticism to play CF and SS, those are the easiest positions on the diamond. Everyone defers, everything's in front of you and just about everything travels pretty true and predictably. Fewer people can play 'em because of the threshold athleticism they require, but if you're among the fortunate few, it's just the rich getting richer. You get the glam job that also happens to be easier and a lot more fun...
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You guys are placing too much meaning into the exact wording Moore used re: Lopez.

He can’t come out and say “we stink this year, and We can gain another year of control of Nicky Lopez by keeping him in the minors through June. We’re not going to waste that to win 71 games instead of 68 or make this year’s product more enjoyable.”

The union would roast him.

Take what GMs day about prospect promotions (or lack thereof) and reasons why with a grain of salt.

The performance at Wilmington is deeply troubling. No way around that. Too many Ks by far, and this is an organization that never had those problems before, even with guys who struggled at Wilmington (Hosmer, in his first taste at age 19, had an ops around .500, but didnt K like this group is).
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It's like the old Hardball game on PC or Commodore 64. If you picked the red team you got stuck with Wratten, Bautista and Dogget - who never got a hit unless it was a blooper.

The other problem with the red team was their catcher, Barnes, was their best hitter. But we figured out catchers never make errors. So the blue team could substitute a good hitter for their crappy-hitting catcher. Not fair.
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For our long term success, Lopez staying in Omaha as long as possible is a goox thing. I just want to be selfish & see some fun baseball this year
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How do you define as long as possible? By whatever time in June service time is no longer an issue? Wait until September call-ups? Next season?
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Maybe, but maybe not.

Sure, you always want to try to get an extra year of team control and/or cost control. But really, that matters far more on guys with genuine star upside. For a guy like Lopez - a good player with the ability to stick for several years but probably not a future all-star, players like that almost invariably extend prior to their FA seasons anyway.

Meanwhile, by slow-playing him you're also just taking away ABs that can be used on his development.

There's probably a few bucks that can be saved here by leveraging that extra year of team control in an extension conversation. But ultimately if you don't find a palatable number for him, he's just gonna refuse to extend early. So if you also hope to get a guy like that to extend before FA, you have to shoot pretty straight in your contract figures.

Pitchers? Yeah, service time games are the way to go there because it's one more year that you get under control when you can see if he's gonna blow up. Players that have superstar potential? Yeah, do that because they're gonna cost a shitload either way.

But a guy who's likely just gonna be a pretty good player for a pretty long time? I'd think that's the kind of guy that often looks to extend after a couple of seasons anyway and at that point the service time game becomes largely moot. So get him up here and see what you have.
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All of this.
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Why is this so hard to understand ?Moore is just saying what is best at this present time under the circumstances of this team.
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It's time Starling played. Starling is as good as Hamilton, and has more upside. Just tired of seeing the old has-beens out there every day!

Hamilton, Owings, Duda, hell even Soler …..need to go!
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Soler?
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