He's clearly good with the glove, has great instincts and baseball IQ. And he played clean ball; I don't remember him making many mistakes in the field.
The questions for me are does he have the range, athleticism, and arm to be an everyday SS in the SEC. I am not saying he does not; but those are open questions for me based on what I've seen in the field.
Arm - concern here is lowest of the three. We didn't see a lot from 2B, but in his limited time at 3B the arm looked ok to me.
Range - he's not fast, we've seen this on the bases probably more than in the field. But maybe he's quick enough. Concern here is low to moderate.
Athleticism - he's definitely not a typical SS build (a bit more stocky than most) and he doesn't really move like one. He absolutely made a few great plays at second this year for sure, but he doesn't exactly make everything look easy, almost like he labors a bit if that makes any sense. This may be more of an eye thing than a real thing; he's just not a silky smooth, easy mover like you see at SS often times. Hard to explain what I mean here, but the counter example is some of the plays Ali made as SS this year, which were incredibly difficult, yet somehow Ali made them smoothly and almost look routine. Ali made lots of challenging plays look really easy. Again, maybe this is more of a style thing than real athleticism difference, but it's the big one for me.
Again, not saying he can't do it but I think this is what a lot of us see and he'd need to demonstrate to the coaches. The coaches no doubt already have a much better handle on this than I, having seen him field thousands of balls by now. Just trying to relate the concerns I think you're reading about here.
