Earlier today, the author published a post regarding rather young Mets shortstop Wilmer Flores and how — somewhat surprisingly, given basically every scouting report about him — Flores had played a mostly average shortstop over 400-plus innings.
Said post included select footage — both of Flores misplaying relatively harmless ground balls and also Flores recording outs on batted balls that are converted less than 50% of the time. What it lacked, however, was any footage of Flores making actual, normal shortstop plays. The purpose of this current post is to address that pressing issue.
Here, for example, is Flores cleanly fielding and throwing to first a ground ball by Miami third baseman Casey McGehee in the fourth inning of the Mets game last night:
And here’s Flores doing basically the exact same thing two innings later:
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Finally, here’s Flores backhanding a Donovan Solano grounder in the ninth and, once again, making an entirely acceptable throw to first:
And because it exists, here’s a final GIF of that last play, except from a different angle:
Weird. The second-to-last and last gif are the same, yet the latter looks like the throw was in the dirt while the former looks like it was on the fly.