Alfonso Soriano
What are they thinking? Before last year Soriano was a poor fielding secondbaseman, then he was traded to DC, and shifted to leftfield. If you remember Alfonso balked at playing the outfield, even stating how he wouldn’t do it. As you know he did play leftfield, looked a little lost at times, but had 22 assists (11 errors), probably because everybody ran on him, testing his arm. This guy had a .969 fielding percentage, roughly the same as his fielding percentage at 2B. Jacque Jones had an object thrown at him from the Bud Lite Bleachers while playing in the Friendly Confines, because of his inept fielding, he posted a .976 mark in RF (same as Sammy Sosa’s career RF fielding pct). Now for the folly, the Cubbies are talking about moving Soriano to CF, frankly they might be better off with John Foggerty out there. I’m sure Budweiser sales will go up as fans try to forget about Juan Pierre and his 2006 1.000 fielding percentage, but maybe perfect is overrated. And maybe the guy who wrote the book about how defense up the middle is important, didn’t know what he was talking about. This all came to mind when I looked at the picture of the front page of today’s Sun-Times Sports section. It’s a picture of Alfonso (who arrived five days early) fielding a flyball. Honestly it looked like the little kid in Little League, who you tried to hide in rightfield, and you hoped a ball wouldn’t be hit there.