John Jaso to first base?

Posted by Jason Wojciechowski on October 7, 2014 at 12:04 AM

Questions persist about John Jaso's future defensive home mainly because of now-repeated concussions, but the A's should have been asking the questions all along because of his astoundingly poor defense behind the plate. As I've said before, it doesn't take advanced metrics to see his defensive habits that surely drive his coaches mad: the wiggling around behind the plate, the stabbing at the ball, the inability to hold a still target and let the ball softly meet it. That it's taken concussions to force him from behind the plate is sad on a personal level, but baseball isn't losing another Maueresque defensive wizard to the tragedies of brain injury.

And by the way, I would heavily discount any idea that Jaso suffers particularly at DH. There does appear to be a DH penalty (though debates remain about the extent to which such can be blamed on managers giving half days off to tired or injured players vs. something intrinsically more difficult about DHing itself, even as there are perfectly good reasons for the latter to be true), but Jaso having a poor year at DH doesn't mean he's more susceptible to it for sone reason (though I don't doubt that there are players whose ability to DH is impaired more than average) -- we need more evidence, probably more than we can ever hope to gather.