Every time Huff makes a defensive mistake, and there have been several this spring, it makes [Travis] Ishikawa's presence on the roster seem all the more vital. Manager Bruce Bochy has said he plans to use a lot of late-inning defensive substitutes this season.
How worried should we be? If Huff has 20 home runs and a .375 OBP by the All-Star break, it'll be easy to overlook the occasional meadow muffin over at first base. But this is a man just as likely to hit like it was 2009 (bad) as he is to revisit his 2008 season (very good). If he stumbles out of the gate with the bat, and his D is anti-Snowinian, Bruce Bochy will have some serious tinkering to do.
Bochy's options are limited. Huff has played a fair amount of 3B, but not recently, and it seems odd flip-flopping him and Sandoval. The only other place on the diamond for Huff is left field, and looking at his defensive history, I was surprised to see he has only played eight major-league games there. He's played more than a year's worth of games in right field, but putting Huff in right at Mays Field is out of the question.
Before we panic too hard over Huff's D, it's worth pointing out that he has played a fair amount at first base recently: 93 games last year with an UZR of -3.5, which basically means he did very little harm. (Career UZR at 1B is -4.) Still, he's never come close to being a full-time starter there, which apparently the Giants are asking him for.
Wait a second, we're heading toward the wrong question: "Can Huff be a full-time first baseman and still hit like a cleanup man should?"
Wrong, because if he doesn't hit like a cleanup man should, he won't get the chance to play first base full-time. God, I hope not. I am assuming -- a dangerous thing -- that the relatively low-cost, one-year deal is a tacit admission by Giants brass that if Huff isn't working out, they won't be too reluctant to cut bait and move on. They know the risk they're taking, and with fingers crossed they hope their $3 M buys them the 2008 Aubrey Huff, or someone close to it.
The bigger question is how nimbly Bruce Bochy will handle all the late-inning defensive substitutions. With the Giants likely to play a lot of close, low-scoring games again this year, Boch's big ol' head will be abuzz with game theory. It's going to be tough, and I'm not necessarily going to blame Bochy for the extra-inning games in which the Giants run out of pinch-hitters by the 10th inning. Mark my words, they're coming.
Imagine this scenario: Bottom of seventh: tie game, Molina lines a double to left, stretches it into a single. Fast pinch-runner enters. Giants eventually score go-ahead run. Top of eighth: starter tires, reliever comes in, Bochy double-switches with Torres replacing DeRosa, Giants retain lead. Top of ninth: Brian Wilson enters for the save, Bochy double-switches and brings in Ishikawa to play 1B. Wilson hacks up a hairball, game is tied and goes to bottom of ninth, Giants use another pinch-hitter, fail to score. Extra innings.
That's four bench players used, perhaps five if Molina is replaced behind the plate by Whiteside, and we're not even into the 10th. (If Bochy were clever he would pinch-run for Molina with someone who could enter defensively, say, Lewis to LF, which moves DeRosa to 3B, which allows Boch to move Pablo from 3B to catcher and save Whiteside for the emergency catcher that he truly should be.)
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