re pleasant yankee surprises in article apr sarah albany edu js albnyvms bitnet writes in article netnews upenn edu sepinwal mail sas upenn edu alan sepinwall writes spike owen sure he s hitting like crazy but the guy cannot field to save his life and they said he was brought in to provide defense velarde stankiewicz and even silvestri are better defensively than owen remember it s still early look for his offense to tail off and his defense to improve hopefully he has that rep because i heard that either last year or over the last years or something like that he has the third highest fielding percentage among major league shortstops behind c r and tony i m not gonna help this sorry mets team at all fernandez i do agree though that he has not looked all that impressive in the field thus far owen only has one error so far i believe that seriously underrepresents the harm he has done in the field owen will cleanly play any ball he reaches he will have a fine fielding percentage like always the problem is that he doesn t reach anything that isn t hit straight at him this wouldn t be quite as obvious a problem if he were playing next to kelly gruber or robin ventura but the third baseman for the yankees is wade boggs who should have moved across the diamond last year i ve only seen one game abbott s first start but there were three balls hit to the left side which would have been stopped by quality defensive players instead they were charged as hits against abbott cheers valentine
