Photo Credit: Ken Mattison (Flickr CC)
Ryan Braun, who the Brewers are considering moving to first base this season.
About a month ago we talked about “Crazy Idea Season” and the opportunity early spring presents for MLB teams to talk a big game about trying out major changes to the way they operate. Sure enough, as the Milwaukee Brewers report to spring training this week they’ve selected their possible big change: Moving Ryan Braun, at least part of the time, to first base.
With 1,458 games played, Braun is the fifth-longest tenured Brewer in franchise history and will likely pass Cecil Cooper for fourth on that list sometime this season. He’s spent nearly all of that time in left field, having moved out there after playing his rookie season at third base in 2007. Early in the 2017 season Braun played his 1,219th game in the outfield, passing Robin Yount for the Brewers’ franchise record for longevity in that defensive role.
It’s not unprecedented, however, for a player like Braun to make a mid-career positional switch. Here are some of the notable Brewers that have done it over the years.
Robin Yount
Any conversation about positional changes for star players has to include Yount, who spent the first eleven years of his MLB career at shortstop but never played the position again after 1984, moving into the outfield and eventually settling in center field for his final nine seasons. The move was born of a sense of necessity: A pair of shoulder surgeries had created questions about Yount’s ability to remain healthy while making the array of throws required to play shortstop.
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Yount is the model example of how well a position change can work out for all involved: In the outfield Yount was healthy enough to be a regular player (averaging 145 games per season) for nine more years, during which time he passed 3,000 hits for his career. He was also the American League MVP while playing center in 1989, picking up a second trophy to store next to the one he won playing shortstop in 1982.
Charlie Moore
Moore is a good example of a player who made a positional switch after offseason transactions created a crowded roster at his original spot. He had played in nearly 700 games as a Brewer and had spent almost all of that time behind the plate when Milwaukee acquired veteran catcher Ted Simmons before the 1981 season and left Moore without a regular position.
Moore spent most of the 1982 season in right field and remained out there for several years after, even though Simmons had largely vacated the catching position by 1983. In 1985 Moore moved back behind the plate and finished his career there.
Corey Hart
A longtime contemporary of Braun’s and a two-time All Star in the Brewers’ outfield, Hart provides both positive and negative precedents for a move from a corner spot to first base. Hart made the switch during the 2012 season, where a spring meniscus surgery had created questions about his mobility. Hart filled a glaring need for a Brewers team that already had Braun, Carlos Gomez and Norichika Aoki in the outfield and did so admirably.
Unfortunately, the 2012 season wasn’t the end of Hart’s knee issues. A second offseason injury and a slow recovery led to him missing the entire 2013 season and never playing full-time in the majors again. The move from the outfield to first base isn’t what abruptly derailed Hart’s career but it certainly didn’t save it, either.
The Brewers’ move from the American League to the National League two decades ago renders a fair number of other comparables moot: The Brewers extended the careers of Paul Molitor, Don Money and the aforementioned Ted Simmons, for example, by keeping them in the lineup as a designated hitter, but that’s not a luxury available to Braun at this point.
At the end of the day, most of the major changes like this that teams discuss in the opening weeks of spring training are forgotten by opening day. When Craig Counsell makes out his first lineup card against the Padres at the end of March we’ll almost certainly see Ryan Braun in left field, as we have in eight of the last 10 years. If Counsell and company do decide to make a change with Braun, however, there’s a wide array of historical precedents to suggest how things might turn out.
